Of all the ways to open a film, Leos Carax chose to walk his cast and the band Sparks out of a recording studio and into the Los Angeles night, singing “So May We Start” straight at us — a dare disguised as an overture. What follows is not a musical the way Hollywood usually means the word. It is a sung-through rock opera, almost every line of dialogue set to music, and it spends a little over two hours pulling the genre apart to see what is still beating underneath.

The story is deceptively small. Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian who performs in a boxer’s robe and calls his act “The Ape of God,” baiting his audience until laughter curdles into discomfort. Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard) is a celebrated opera soprano who, as Henry needles, “dies” on stage every night and then takes her bows. They fall in love under the tabloids’ floodlights, and the birth of their daughter, Annette — a child with an extraordinary gift — turns their gilded life inside out.

And here is the move that tells you exactly what kind of film you are in: for almost its entire running time, Annette is played not by a child but by a wooden marionette. It is a bold, alienating choice — and also a tender one, because the puppet lets Carax stage a fable about parenthood, exploitation and fame without ever asking a real child to carry it. Caroline Champetier’s camera prowls through storms, stages and a green-screen sea; the look is sumptuous and deliberately handmade, theatrical in the best sense of the word.

The engine under all of it is Sparks. Ron and Russell Mael wrote the story and the songs, and Annette began life as one of their albums before Carax turned it into cinema. The score loops its motifs like incantations — “We Love Each Other So Much” returns until it sounds less like devotion than a trap — and asks the actors to sing live, raw and unpolished. Simon Helberg, as the accompanist who once loved Ann, is handed the film’s most quietly devastating number, conducting an orchestra while confessing straight down the lens.

Driver is extraordinary, a force of barely contained menace who sings through clenched teeth and never once lets you settle on whether Henry is a wounded artist or a monster wearing the costume of one. Cotillard has the harder, more thankless role — Ann is icon more than character by design — and she fills the silences between the notes with grief. The film knows it is building toward an act of violence, and it earns the dread long before it arrives.

Annette opened the Cannes Film Festival and won Carax the Best Director prize, then split audiences clean down the middle — which is exactly the response a film this committed to its own strangeness ought to provoke. Since then it has hardened into a cult object: the kind of swing-for-the-fences musical the studio system no longer knows how to make, kept alive by viewers who treasure precisely the things that send everyone else to the exits.

Excessive, provocative and built with real craft, Annette is the rare contemporary musical with the nerve to be difficult. It will not be for everyone — and it has no interest in being. We love it for exactly that.