In 2021, Nicolas Cage is more meme than movie star, and more of either than the serious actor he’s long since proven himself capable of being. So it makes sense that when word of Pig first reached me (via an office chatroom), it was as a kind of bonkers genre film: a thriller with a premise so left-field you had to see it to just understand why it was made. It’s Taken, but with a truffle pig instead of a kidnapped daughter? And a mountain-man Nicolas Cage tracing a path of vengeance? How could you look at the trailer, which climaxes on Cage asking “who has my pig?” with grim determination, and not sense/fear that some virus of internet-savvy irony is being catered to?

Happy news, then, that Pig is a deeply unironic film. Absurd, yes, but unironic—and a welcome reminder of how the two can be combined. Cage’s status as a camp figure in the age of GIFs can be chalked up, by my count, to at least four factors. First, a certain interplay of star power and chameleonism; no matter what wig, beard, or accent he’s under, he signifies primarily as Nicolas Cage. Second, that he projects a kind of natural softness that can be at odds with whatever action hero or hardened badass he’s asked to play. Third, that he’s unafraid of an emotive, even over-the-top commitment to outlandish material. And fourth, that the outlandish material he’s been in for the last two decades (action, horror, thriller, etc.) has tended to not be very serious—and has dovetailed with suitably outlandish tabloid stories (something about IRS problems and a private island?).

Pig, whether by intent or happenstance, either addresses, inverts, or willfully dodges all of the above. Cage plays a reclusive Oregon truffle hunter who, after his beloved pet pig is stolen, must descend into Portland’s restaurant underworld (complete with a fight club) and reckon with his past—a past that turns out to be less the stuff of thrillers than what we might call “the human condition.” It calls on Cage to be understated, and he delivers: even in scenes where every other emotion or situation feels simulated, his commitment to stoic pain is the film’s grounding force. There are even times, amidst all this talk of having once been somebody, of wanting to stay true to your craft, and of coping with an industry that’s changed beyond recognition, where you sense that the filmmakers are thinking of something closer to home than kidnapped pigs.

The result, directed by Michael Sarnoski (in his feature film debut) and co-produced by Cage himself, is a slack but endearing indie. Padded in a few too many contemporary minimalist mannerisms, it’s not much more than a curio of 2021, and I doubt it will still be here in 2022. But its pondering of obsolescence in a cutthroat business finds passages that are both soulful and playful, and it refuses to become a bonkers genre film at precisely the moment when that direction would be most natural. And so it is an oddball exercise in what remains of the star system. It needs an action star so it can avoid being an action movie. It needs a camp figure in order to have gravitas. It needs a known quantity so it can feel random. And most of all, it needs a terrific actor whose brand has strayed from terrific acting. In which case, dropping a stone-faced trailer that’s both perfectly honest and sounds like a put-on is wholly appropriate. It’s practically a movie to let a meme become a man.

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Pig is now available to rent on iTunes and Amazon. It’s released by Neon, which is A24 for insomniacs.