The title of Richard Linklater's film Me and Orson Welles is both grammatically iffy and a case of misplaced priorities.
Orson Welles takes second billing to no one.
And he certainly doesn't place second to Zac Efron.
Me and Orson Welles is a movie that is very much like the 1982 Peter O'Toole classic My Favourite Year, in that it is about a naif coming comically face-to-face with a one-man theatrical force-of-nature.
If you remember that movie, do you recall who played the kid? Exactly. (It was Mark Linn-Baker, by the way). All anybody remembers is O'Toole.
In the same way, one comes away from Me and Orson Welles with one thing burned indelibly into the brain, the tour-de-force performance of a British actor named Christian McKay as the young Welles -- by turns arrogant, flip, blazingly and extemporaneously talented, seductive, vindictive and magnetic.
This is not to dismiss Efron, the High School Musical heartthrob who obviously yearns to be taken seriously.
He is solid enough in this sepia-tone-drenched tale of a talented '30s high school kid who BS's his way into a small role in Welles' Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar -- a cutting-edge work for the time that contemporized the Bard with almost fascist overtones.
It would be the production that would effectively "make" Welles' career. And his relentless determination to knock the socks off the opening-night critics gives him free rein to lie, cajole, flatter and threaten.
Against this backdrop, Efron's character Richard (who is cast as Lucius in the play), learns myriad lessons about the life and superstitions of theatre people, and even gains the mercurial favour of the Great Man himself. Soon, he becomes a veritable company mascot, amid a cast of characters that includes a nebbish writer, a stagefright-stricken Marc Antony (Ben Chaplin) and real-life actors-playing-actors like John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) and Joseph Cotten (James Tupper).
Though everything Wellesian is about the "passion" of theatre, Richard discovers that his real-life teenage passion is a poor mix with the cold-blooded version peddled by the Maestro.
The catalyst for this collision is Sonja (Claire Danes), Welles' do-everything secretary, who develops an older-woman crush on the kid (to the chagrin of every male in the production who'd been trying to put the "make" on her). Her free-spirited fling with Richard is returned by feelings of true adolescent fire -- a love-of-my-life obsession that soon clashes with the job at hand, to perform the miracle that is a successful Broadway play.
As mentioned, Efron does a creditable job carrying this part of the dramatic load, and he delivers the glib dialogue with smart-alecky verve.
But the movie is only really alive when McKay's Welles arrives in any scene, like a storm blowing through the room. It's a tall order to recreate the magnetism that Welles commanded in his youth (and later squandered), and it's an object reminder that there are actors and there are movie stars.
The fact is, Me and Orson Welles probably wouldn't have been made without the participation of a movie star named Zac Efron. But it would never have come to life but for a relatively unknown actor named Christian McKay.
(This film is rated PG)
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