Film review: Me and Orson Welles

Director: Richard Linklater
With: Christian McKay, Claire Danes and Zac Efron.
Released: 4 December

This new film directed by Richard Linklater is both a love letter and a poison-pen letter to the theatre. It celebrates the romance of putting on a play with a team of like-minded enthusiasts, but it also suggests that those devotees would betray each other in an instant to further their own careers. It's similarly ambivalent about Orson Welles, arguing that his genius and his selfishness were two sides of the same coin.

A fictional story about true events, Me and Orson Welles is set in 1937 when Welles was still trying to make his mark as an actor and director. He's based in a Broadway theatre, working on a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar (because modern dress is cheaper than hiring Roman costumes), a process that sees him firing his underlings as often as he cuts other people's lines. This high turnover allows  a 17-year-old schoolboy called Richard (Zac Efron, the High School Musical pin-up) to talk his way into a walk-on part. For Richard, it's a dream come true. Not only is his acting career under way, but also he seems to be making headway with Sonja (Claire Danes), a production assistant who has refused the advances of every man in the company, Welles included. But Richard soon learns some hard lessons about show business and a few other things besides.

The film, whose soundtrack is stocked with all the usual Gershwin and Porter, may be a light and breezy backstage farce, but it reveals as much about Welles as any documentary. It shows him in his twenties, before he'd made his debut film, but he's already equipped with enormous charm and confidence, and always ready with a conjuring trick or some well-rehearsed flattery to seduce his audience, whether he's on stage or off it.

He has no qualms about lavishing all his attention on somebody one day and then abandoning them the next, just as long as it benefits his art and, incidentally, himself. It's a sparkling performance by Christian McKay, and all the more effective for being his first film role, so the viewer can forget, from time to time, that they're not watching the real Welles. It's just a shame that, as an actor, Efron is as outclassed as his character is.

McKay's Welles is so charismatic that it's easy to see why people were devoted to him, even while he drove them to distraction. Likewise, theatre itself is depicted with such glowing warmth that you can understand why Richard is smitten, even after he discovers that many of his fellow thespians keep playing roles after the curtain comes down.

Nicholas Barber