Over the course of a mysterious, hallucinatory night, the Devil and his entourage pay a midnight visit to Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, whose recent work Moliere has just been shut down by the authorities. By magic, these characters, having escaped from Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, transform themselves and perform the play, transposing the playwright's 1930s attack on censorship and hypocrisy in Stalin's Soviet Union to the America of today: a government paralyzed by vicious partisanship and a society obsessed with celebrity. Is the Artist a revolutionary and provocateur or...