Nicolas Cage has been making “push me over the edge” B and C movies for so long that all longtime fans have to hear is a title — “The Surfer,” for instance — to guess the movie built around it.

But he’s such a fascinating figure — antic, twitchy and edgy is his brand, easily and often impersonated, but also revered, an Oscar winner and fangirl/fanboy legend, and an actor disturbed to the point of constantly working “to stay out of my own head” he once told me in an interview — that pigeonholing him ALWAYS has the potential to blow up in your face.

Casting him in a movie titled “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” is about as on-the-nose as movies about movie-star reps gets.

“Pig” was the title that should have taught us, once and for all, that “Nobody puts Nic in a pigeon hole.” We figured “Somebody stole his pig, and he’ll go all NICOLAS CAGE on them.” And that wasn’t what the movie was about. At all.

But that “anticipation” of a Cage breakdown drove “Pig” just as surely as it drives “The Surfer.” Because somebody stole Nic Cage’s surfboard. And somebody’s going to have to give it back.

Thomas Martin’s screenplay presents Cage’s Surfer as a man in crisis. He’s longed to buy the coastal Australian home he grew up in, perhaps hoping to patch-up a failed marriage with that act, to give his teen son access to the great waves that made The Surfer so good at surfing. He’s well over 50, driving a Lexus and making enough in the firm where he works that he’s close to closing the deal on that Luna Bay home on the hill overlooking the sea.

But it’s all just beyond his reach, and he’s on the edge of manic about it. Even taking a day off, pulling his son (Finn Little) out of school for a little surfing has him cell-phone badgering his real estate broker for cash and leverage to get this deal done.

And then they park at his childhood beach, and the “localist” locals greet him with open hostility.

“Don’t live here, don’t surf here.”

Public beach? It’s not crowded? Even “I grew up here” falls on furious deaf ears among the brawny young belligerents who get in his face. “Surf Nazis” people used to call them. And if you remember a wacky Troma Films comedy of a few decades back, you figure you know where this is going.

Surf Nazis Must Die.”

But even the presence of a perfectly vile villain is a set up to defy expectations. Julian McMahon of “Nip/Tuck” and “FBI’s Most Wanted” summons up a little Victor Von Doom (his one Marvel role) villainy as Scally, a privileged Luna Bay lifer who dabbles in “men’s movement” counseling when he’s not running this gang of surf bullies as his personal “redisover and assert your maniliness” cult.

Our Surfer, raised in America after a tragedy took away his family home, runs right up against an Aussie stereotype — violent macho bully boys and their robed, uncompromising guru leader.

Scally keeps presenting his advice as peace offerings, consoling the surfer about “losing face” in front of his son, but firmly telling him “you gotta know when to back down. Or it could get a lot worse.”

It does. And as The Surfer starts losing his son’s respect, his possessions, his status and his dream, he starts to reason out how this all might end.

Trapped there, dehydrated, without access to cash or contact with his broker, he can see The Bum (Nicholas Cassim) living in an old Subaru wagon, swearing vengeance on Scally for what happened to his own life and own son. The Surfer can see his life unraveling and this bum as his future.

The movie is about a man facing emasculating old age and the destruction of everything he thinks his life is about. The fact that he’s hallucinating flashbacks to his childhood trauma makes us and him question if he is who he thinks he is and which version of “reality” is the one he’s fated to live in.

Irish director Lorcan Finnegan (“Vivarium,” “Nocebo”) doesn’t wholly transcend his rep for cerebral thrillers that don’t quite come off. But this “frustrating” film does a great job of portraying a man in crisis who might not recognize that crisis, and of painting Australia in forbidding terms — a beautiful place with all sorts of deadly wildlife (seen in closeup as The Surfer dodges snakes and the like) and plenty of less-than-welcoming locals who treat belligerence as a national birthright.

“The Surfer” bites off more than it can existentially chew, but it works well enough. And Cage, McMahon, Cassim and Justin Rosniak, as the stereotypical cop-who-sides-with-the-bullying-locals are terrific — by turns hatefully or ruefully so.

And with this film Cage puts over another curveball in a career that’s taught us to expect the high, inside bean ball with every pitch.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity and “some sexual material.”

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Finn Little, Rahel Romahn, Justin Rosniak, Alexander Bertrand and Nicholas Cassim.

Credits: Directed by Lorcan Finnegan, scripted by Thomas Martin. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:40