There are any number of characteristic Nicolas Cage scenes in Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” interludes you watch with a now-familiar mixture of genuine appreciation and more than a touch of bewilderment.

Mr. Herzog’s film is very loosely based on a 1992 movie simply called “Bad Lieutenant,” directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Harvey Keitel.

The two films feature performances that make you wonder where the character leaves off and the man playing him has taken hold, a slippage that can lead to greatness, but also to moments of such excess and even grotesque comedy that they leave you squirming.

Mr. Cage revels in that slippage, though it was only after seeing “Bad Lieutenant” that I was reminded of how freaky he can be - and how exhilarating it can be to watch an actor go far and then just a little too far.

Seduced by Mr. Herzog’s baroque narrative style and the perfect synchronicity of a star going all out, I began to look at Mr. Cage anew. There have been enough weird and wrong turns in his career that it was easy to develop a sense of his talent and its limits early on. In part that’s because right from the start - he played a lovelorn punk in “Valley Girl” (1983), his breakout role - there have been moments, even entire films where his grandiose gestures and weird vocalizations have gotten the better of him.

What makes Mr. Cage such an unusual screen presence and an even more atypical movie star is that he’s habitually very good and very bad from movie to movie, and sometimes scene to scene in a single film.

This insistent watchable quality was there from the beginning. Journalists soon learned that Mr. Cage was also a colorful off-camera character, making much of his immersive preparations.

A chronicle of his early years invariably includes the story about how he had some of his teeth pulled, apparently without anesthetic, to grasp the pain of a Vietnam veteran for his role in “Birdy” (1984), along with a reference to the very live, very wiggly water bug he swallowed on camera for “Vampire’s Kiss” (1989).

These early excesses began to cling to him, even define him, making it difficult to separate the man, the method and the madness.

The transformation from the kind of actor who earns critical notice for the likes of David Lynch (“Wild at Heart,” 1990) while paying his bills with a “Top Gun” knockoff (“Fire Birds,” also 1990) occurred when after picking up his Oscar, he soon showed up in “The Rock,” the first of six movies he has made for the uberproducer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Directed by Michael Bay with the usual fireballs and spatiotemporal confusion, “The Rock” didn’t put Mr. Cage into the same box-office company as Tom Cruise. But for the first time Mr. Cage was showing real action muscle in a Top 10 box-office title.

Over the past decade additional blockbuster success in “Con Air,” “Gone in 60 Seconds” and both “National Treasure” movies have also turned Mr. Cage into one of the most dependable stars for both Mr. Bruckheimer and for Disney.

There were also romantic roles, some more convincing than others, including “Leaving Las Vegas,” the 1995 drama for which he won the Academy Award for best actor as a Hollywood dropout who drinks himself to death. In recent years Mr. Cage’s lack of discrimination (or taste) has threatened to overshadow the sweep of his career, which is understandable if you’ve seen him wearing a bear costume in the laughable remake of “The Wicker Man” (2006).

Yet after “Bad Lieutenant” I wonder if the narrative that many of us have grafted onto his career - the early if erratic promise, the mature successes, the dire midlife choices - does him an injustice. The truth is that he gets the job done in entertainments like “National Treasure” and “Knowing” (2009), which assumedly give him the financial freedom to cut loose with a director like Mr. Herzog.

Mr. Cage has made a habit of failure and frequently sold out his talent. And yet, as “Bad Lieutenant” shows, he remains the same Nicolas Cage of his early, later and most critically lauded career: the man of a thousand facial tics, a student of all accents and a master of none, a star who, for better, worse and sometimes both, gives us reason after reason to go to the movies.


REUTERS / Nicolas Cage, seen with Elisabeth Shue, won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas in 1995.