Although he won an Academy Award for “Leaving Los Vegas” and was nominated for another with “Adaptation,” Nicholas Cage is definitely an acquired taste. For as many people who think he’s one of the finest actors of his generation, just as many can’t even stand to look at him. Personally, I think he’s brilliant, and from “Birdy” to “Wild at Heart” to “Moonstruck” to “Vampire’s Kiss” to “The Rock” to “Peggy Sue Got Married” to “Red Rock West” to “Face/Off” to “Matchstick Men” to this year’s “Lord of War,” I find Cage to be a singular talent worth getting excited about every time out.

Granted, not everything in the actor’s cannon has turned out grand. Schlock like “Fire Birds” and “8mm” border on being neigh unwatchable, while action films like “Con Air” and “Gone in 60 Seconds” almost made me want to take back every nice word I’d ever said about him. But for every dog like “Captain Correlli’s Mandolin” there is a “Leaving Las Vegas,” every snoozer like “City of Angels” there is an “Adaptation,” two movies so fearlessly original and magnificent they’re instant classics.

What does any of this have to do with Cage’s new dark comedy-drama-slice-of-life “The Weather Man?” Well, Gore Verbinski’s (“Pirates of the Caribbean”) change-of-pace melodrama is so unlike anything else out there right now (at least from a Hollywood studio) how much a person takes to it is directly related to how much they enjoy the work of the headlining superstar. Don’t like Nicholas Cage? You might as well stay away. Indifferent to him? Be prepared for a grim sojourn into the pitfalls of being ordinary. Love and can’t get enough of the guy? Run, don’t walk, to the local theater and revel in another trademark one-of-a-kind performance elevating “The Weather Man” into the stratosphere.

Cage plays David Spritz, a popular Chicago TV weatherman who has a shot to become a national celebrity when he’s asked to audition for nationwide morning news program, hosted by Bryant Gumbell no less, “Hello America”. All seems perfect, David’s professional life as sunny and warm as the most perfect afternoon weekend. Personally, however, a storm is brewing, and no matter how hard David tries to make things work the worse the outlook for happiness keeps getting.

Why? For one thing, his father, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Spritzel (Michael Caine) has just discovered he’s got cancer. For another, estranged wife Noreen (Hope Davis) appears to be getting far too chummy with a slightly overweight schmuck named Russ (Michael Rispoli). Even worse, kids Mike (Nicholas Hoult) and Shelly (Gemmenne de la Pena) seem to be going through a pint-sized version of a midlife crisis, neither of them old enough to drive let alone have issues so intense they’re driving them to marijuana and cigarettes. Yet here they both are, one trying to make it through drug counseling while the other wears clothes far too small for her frame and sneaks 100’s during recess.

“The Weather Man” is an aggressively downbeat picture showcasing the failure of a family man completely ill-equipped to try and make things right. David can’t walk down the street without someone pestering him for an autograph or pelting him with fast food, his clothes stained with the sugary residue of McDonald’s Apple Pie or drenched in the sticky wetness of a 7-11 Big Gulp. As hard as he tries to do the right things, every time the weatherman believes he’s making the right decision, things keep going agonizingly wrong proving time and again David just doesn’t have a clue.

This is not an easy movie for an audience. While it is funny – sometimes achingly so – nothing here should be construed as comedy. But it isn’t drama, either, much of the picture too surreal and esoteric to be thought of in any of the standard genre vernaculars. No, Steve Conrad’s dazzling script is something else entirely. It’s life, and not just any life, but that of an ordinary man looking through the prisms of his apprehensions and asking, “Is this really all I am?”

Not an easy sell by any stretch of the imagination, and it is crucial to the piece’s success that the actors are up to the task. Thankfully, they are and then some. The kids are both wonderful, while Gil Bellows (as Mike’s lecherous counselor) and Rispoli nail their supporting parts with aplomb. Davis might have the hardest role, alternating having to make the audience want Noreen to get back together with David while at the same time making them also understand why this can never happen. She’s splendid, doing this so deftly and so completely I can’t imagine another doing it quite so well.

But this is Cage and Caine’s show, no question, beginning to end. The latter commands attention just with the lift of a brow, fully encompassing the bewildered mind of a great man realizing his spectacularly unaccomplished son will be a greater success, an “American success” as he calls it, than he ever was. Cage, on the other hand, has the unenviable task of playing a perfectly unlikable, if still well-meaning, rube and he’s in nearly every scene. Yet his performance is galvanizing, funny and pathetic and endearing and deplorable in so many different ways a person could lose track of them all if they were trying to keep count. It is a remarkable fearless exposé, and while I can’t say I necessarily liked spending over two hours with the man I certainly didn’t mind it, either.

This movie is long, though, Verbinski stretching some moments of it to almost unbelievable lengths. And, as European as the flavor gets, and as consistently astonishing many of vignettes are, this is still a pretty downbeat affair. “The Weather Man” is a hard watch no matter which way you look at it, the constant strum and drang of it all trying for even the most patient cineaste. And, as sharp as the writing gets and as assured as Verbinski’s direction it’s all fairly abstruse stream-of-consciousness sort of stuff, demanding in the kinds of ways things out of Hollywood seldom – if ever – are.

Of curse, that last point isn’t really a bad thing. Demanding isn’t always a dirty word (unless you’re an accountant for a major Hollywood studio), and asking viewers to think and ask questions – and to force them to have an opinion – is something to which more filmmakers should aspire. As a director, Verbinski just keeps getting better and better, proving himself to be far more than just a pop entertainment maestro, more than willing to go to deeper, richer terrain then a Disney theme park ride or a reimagination of a Japanese classic. Sure it’s a bit of a downer, but it sheds light into recesses many of us don’t like to admit are even there.

That’s the glory of Conrad’s screenplay, as sad and disheartening as David’s plight is everything he does, every move he makes is made from a place of love. Every pore of the story feels real, lived in, deeply felt, all of it working as if the writer took a peak at a cross-section of American families and had the visionary wherewithal to dig right into what makes even the most diverse of them unique. What goes on here is exactly what many families go through, and while that doesn’t exactly make it easy to watch it certainly does make it relatable.

Still, the weight of the whole thing can’t help but ruse and fall upon how much one ends up being impressed by Cage. No matter how good Phedon Papamichael’s phenomenal photography, how wonderful Hans Zimmer’s stunning score, how excellent Craig Wood’s sublime editing, none of it matters a lick if a person isn’t a fan of the lead actor. “The Weather Man” is entirely his rainstorm, and where some will only find a convergence zone filled with nothing more than hot air, others will find themselves enraptured by glorious multicolored rainbows. Personally, while I wouldn’t forget an umbrella, I’d make sure and have my sunglasses, Cage, Verbinski and Conrad crafting a cavalcade of sunny meteorological cinematic events I can’t wait to see again.