A Different Man has the airy, sidelong reality of a modern fable. The film stars Sebastian Stan as Edward, a man who lives an isolated life due to a condition that causes significant disfigurement of his facial features. Stirred to frustrated action after he decides that his affection for a new neighbor (Renate Reinsve) is fruitless, Edward undergoes an experimental procedure that completely eradicates the affliction. He adopts a pseudonym and embarks on a new life, and then his feelings of triumph start to shift. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg has had a bilateral cleft lip and palate all his life, and his experience being ostracized because of it drives the bleak humor of the storytelling. The film goes beyond a grass-is-always-greener argument to strikingly state that running away from one’s own self is a certainty path to careening right into a brick wall. Stan is stupendous in the lead role, enveloping himself in Edward’s body language as it goes from uncomfortably coiled to loosening bravado and back again. He plays loss, discomfort, and frustration with the clarity of a soliloquy. In a key supporting role, Adam Pearson, an actor who has a version of neurofibromatosis similar to the one the weighs on Stan’s character, swoops in and nearly steals the film away with a thrillingly charismatic turn. Although I don’t think that development is deliberately meant as meta-commentary on the film itself, it does work that way, at least somewhat. In the deliriously off-balance A Different Man, nothing could be more fitting.