There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy “Goodrich” where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.

But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration.” He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that “Goodrich” writer- director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.

“I wrote it 100% with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”

And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”

“When you just look at Michael in ‘Beetlejuice’ or even ‘Batman,’ he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman. Because you just look at him and go ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”

That level of pizazz may feel unfamiliar to viewers who most recently saw Keaton as a kindhearted country doctor who tumbles into OxyContin addiction in the 2021 series “Dopesick,” for which he won an Emmy and a Golden Globe, or caught his more subdued, serious turns in speaking-truth-to-power dramas like “Spotlight” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”

Few parts, though, have synthesized his gifts for bridging comedy and drama as deftly as “Birdman,” the bravura 2014 Alejandro Iñárritu fantasy that earned Keaton his first best actor nod at the Academy Awards and took home four Oscars, including best picture.

That performance, which required the star of two “Batman” films to play a washed-up actor who had once been a superhero, was widely billed as a comeback after several fallow years in Hollywood. Keaton, 73, understands the narrative, even if he doesn’t quite agree with it.

“Look, there was a period where it was a combination of I had zero interest, I wasn’t in anything good, I wasn’t good,” he said. “No one was knocking on my door. The one thing I will credit myself for is that I never got desperate. Never get desperate.”

His 2024 release schedule includes the low-key drama “Knox Goes Away,” now streaming on Max, in which he directs and stars as a hit man with a fast-moving form of dementia; “Goodrich,” in theaters Oct. 18; and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the 35-years-in-gestation sequel to “Beetlejuice” that reunites him and Burton as well as several of the original movie’s stars, including Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara.

For a long time, Keaton and Burton wavered over whether there should be any follow-up at all. When the two men first met in the late 1980s and began workshopping the look and feel of Keaton’s Beetlejuice character — a puckish undead trickster with a taste for cockroaches and jailhouse-stripe suits — they were largely winging it.

“It was Tim’s first big movie,” Keaton recalled. “I mean, he had done ‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’ before. But it was the two of us, with almost no one looking over our shoulders, saying ‘I don’t know — what do you think of this?’ ‘Oh cool, I love that! You know what would be fun? If I go and do X, Y, Z.’ It was just freaking glorious. So to do that again, to re- create that, is asking a lot of writers.”

Over several decades, spec scripts came and went; none of them quite hit the spot. The new storyline they settled on — a bit of a Gothic lark that finds the family of O’Hara’s and Ryder’s characters once again terrorized by unwelcome visitors from the afterlife — was expanded to include Jenna Ortega, the deadpan star of Burton’s hit Netflix series “Wednesday,” and the sultry Italian actor Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s vengeful, long- estranged wife.

Between jobs perhaps most notable for their paycheck value, like the recently shelved “Batgirl” and various animated voice roles (“Cars,” “Toy Story 3,” “Minions”), Keaton has increasingly turned his focus to smaller, more personal projects.

“Knox Goes Away” is one of those, a quiet story that required the actor to play a professional killer and failed family man — he’s divorced and hasn’t spoken to his grown son, played by James Marsden, for decades — who finds that he has an aggressive brain disease. It’s a melancholy, mercurial film, both wistful and bloody, with an intricate crime subplot baked into the script. It’s also the second time, oddly, that Keaton has helmed and starred in a film about a hit man, after “The Merry Gentleman” in 2008.

Life-or-death stakes are certainly less literal in the breezy and bittersweet “Goodrich,” although knotty issues of family and mortality still apply. In the movie, Keaton plays Andy Goodrich, a hustling careerist whose art business starts to fail around the same time that his second wife leaves him with their 9-year-old twins, and his adult daughter (Mila Kunis) is preparing to give birth to her first child.

“Knox” and “Goodrich” are, to some degree, about the failures and regrets of parenting: two very different portraits of absentee dads hoping to redeem themselves before the clock runs out. In his personal life, though, tales of family dysfunction don’t appear to hold much draw for Keaton. The youngest of seven children born and raised in a blue-collar Catholic household outside Pittsburgh, he recalled growing up with “three of the greatest sisters and the greatest mom,” along with three older brothers and “a lot of wild friends.” The picture he painted was of an outdoorsy, happily analog childhood, heavy on daredevilry and shenanigans.

So when success came to him in the early ’80s after two years of studying at Kent State and a wobbly stint in stand-up, Keaton promptly bought a ranch near Big Timber, Montana, where he lives for much of the year. And while his marriage to actor Caroline McWilliams ended in 1990 (she died in 2010), being present as a dad took precedence over certain professional considerations. “I could have made tons more movies, made much more money,” he said. “But I had a son because I wanted to be a father. I mean, I just enjoyed it.”

Keaton’s evident pride in his only child, Sean Douglas, a songwriter and music producer with two kids of his own, is often displayed on the actor’s Instagram, where he has close to 1 million followers.

His reputation as Montana Man tends to precede him now in every profile, although Keaton dispelled the perception that he is some kind of lone-wolf homesteader on the range. “I have almost as many friends there now as I do in New York and LA and all over the world,” he said.

“I love people that still have a sense of ‘you don’t know everything about them,’ you know what I mean?” Burton said. “We’re in this world where everybody knows everything about everybody, and it kind of loses its mystique a little bit. Michael comes into the room, and he’s like a prizefighter. He dances into the ring just for a little bit, and then he gets out of the race.”

Keaton saw it slightly differently. “I’m the ultimate cake-and-eat-it-too guy. I admit I am,” he said. “People say, ‘Well, it doesn’t work like that.’ And I say ‘It’s worked pretty well for me.’ ”