In the early 1980s, Nicolas Cage got his first big breaks in Martha Coolidge’s “Valley Girl” and Amy Heckerling’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” films that zeroed in on the peculiar allure of his dopey bad boy persona.
Watching him was like eating a banana split: You tasted something nutty, sweet, indulgent, all-American.
Since then, few actors have been able to match how nimble a polymorph Cage is in genre, how easily he power-bounces between action (“National Treasure”), comedy (“Moonstruck”) and horror (“Pay the Ghost”).
He’s done the same for a who’s who of boundary-pushing directors, including the Coen brothers (“Raising Arizona”), David Lynch (“Wild at Heart”) and Spike Jonze (“Adaptation”).
Each is rated on a scale of bees — one for sleepy, five for loony — in honor of the insects that tortured him in the 2006 remake of “The Wicker Man.”