Winona Ryder and Peter Sarsgaard in Experimenter (Magnolia Pictures)

Writer, producer, and director Michael Almereyda is one of the more exciting filmmakers working today. He is interested in serious, intellectual themes, adapting Shakespeare in Cymbeline earlier this year or dramatizing the life and work of famed social scientist Stanley Milgram in his latest film, Experimenter. Yet Almereyda is not so much paying homage to the genius of the Bard or transmitting information about a historical figure. Weighty source material is merely an enticing hook. He turned Cymbeline into something of an extended Sons of Anarchy episode, with mixed results. The mannerism of that film was stifling, and the gritty street gang elements seemed put-on. He was clearly going for something new, but he didn’t quite find it.

With Experimenter, he’s found it. The key is the stabilizing presence of star Peter Sarsgaard as Dr. Milgram, whose grounded performance anchors Almereyda’s irrepressible, even comically anarchic, artistic flourishes. From the opening scenes, when the comedian Jim Gaffigan squeals and waddles his way through large stretches, it’s clear that this is not going to be a realistic, disturbing dramatization of an influential experiment, such as this year’s The Stanford Prison Experiment. We’ve had that already. This is something different.

Dr. Milgram became famous, and infamous, for his 1960s obedience experiments at Yale University. His subjects were selected to be “teachers” who administered increasingly powerful electric shocks to “learners” in an adjoining room when they answered questions incorrectly. The researcher insists that the teachers keep giving shocks and that they have no choice. Of course, the teachers have a choice—they can simply walk out of the room whenever they want. But the vast majority of them administered the highest level of shocks, just because they’re told to.

The scenes all have a strange, detached intensity, a sort of restrained immediacy, anarchism perfectly balanced with formalism. Every scene combines the loose immediacy of a stage play with disciplined energy and quiet foreboding. The seriousness of the academic setting and the austere, grounded Sarsgaard are perfect foils for Almereyda’s subversive sensibility.

On the strength of his groundbreaking obedience experiments, the results of which revealed the American public have a lot more in common with, say, the Nazis than they would be comfortable admitting, Dr. Milgram lands a plum job at Harvard. However, he struggles to follow-up his hit experiment with others. Slowly but surely, Dr. Milgram reveals himself to be at best a one-hit wonder, and at worst a hack.

The details in Experimenter are well executed. The production design is excellent, as the researchers go from early sixties clean, crisp white shirts and skinny black ties to wrinkled, colorful seventies grime and fat ties. Their offices change from sterile, clean white to bright orange and green. It also helps that the film’s largely set in the heavily elocutionary sixties, when people bothered communicating in complete sentences and opened their mouths fully when they spoke. It helps sell Almereyda’s mannerist approach.

The time jumps to 1967, when Milgram’s failure to produce another hit, combined with growing suspicion of the ethics of his obedience experiment, drops him from Harvard to the CUNY Grad Center. The absurdity that had been lurking throughout in sporadic flourishes now becomes more fully entrenched in the foreground. Sarsgaard dons a comically, obviously fake bushy beard, and his carefully combed black hair becomes permanently set in an impossible tousle. He’s slowly becoming an actor in the movie of his life. Late in the film, Milgram’s wife, Sasha (Winona Ryder), tells their children that “Father is turning into a fictional character.”

This literally happens, once Milgram agrees to sell the rights to his book Obedience to Authority to CBS. The studio wants to use it as a springboard to more ideas. Soon enough, they have a TV movie called The Tenth Level set to go. Heartthrob Kellan Lutz plays William Shatner playing Milgram, and Dennis Haysbert plays Ossie Davis as his Black Best Friend, which was added in because the source material was lacking such a key element.

Almereyda seems to be suggesting that we’ve already seen a straightforward dramatization of the experiment, and though the results of it are important, that has already been covered sufficiently. What we haven’t seen dramatized is the concept of an experimenter whose data is human behavior itself, ideal material for an innovative filmmaker to tackle, in an appropriately experimental way.

Each resulting sequence is something of an experiment, and they nearly all work, thanks in part to the strength of the cast, down to the smallest parts, including frequent Almereyda collaborators John Leguizamo, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and Anton Yelchin. Each development keeps you on the edge of your seat, as you don’t know what strange trick awaits you and what style and tone will be used to communicate a given piece of Dr. Milgram’s biography.

Experimenter is certainly strange, and some may not care for Sarsgaard’s frequent breaking of the fourth wall, among other things. But the strangeness is warranted. There is something deeply odd about social science experiments where human nature itself is being tested. What kind of person would do this? What is it, really, to perform these tests on human nature?

An experimenter will often fail—that is the nature of the job. Some work, some don’t. Many of Milgram’s later endeavors don’t work. Almereyda, of course, is an experimenter to his core, likely drawn to this perplexing figure more for what he represents (as one of postwar America’s foremost social scientists) than for any interest in soberly reenacting the details of his academic work.