Me and Orson Welles (***)

Some may know Orson Welles as the director of (an actor in) Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil, others as the man behind the 1939 War of the Worlds radio broadcast that panicked America, or even, as I first encountered him in the 1970s, as the rotund, bearded pitchman who intoned that “We will sell no wine before its time.” But this movie covers none of that, being set earlier. Welles (Christian McKay) is in 1937 merely known as a talented young radio and stage actor, as well as the director of the political operetta The Cradle Will Rock (whose presentation is recounted in a 1999 Tim Robbins movie of the same name).

But already Welles has the force of personality to match his obvious genius (and later physical size). Although the primary storyline is supposed to be about a young actor (Zac Efron) talking his way into the cast of Welles’s Julius Caesar and romancing Welles’s Girl Friday (Claire Danes), and the movie also represents a snapshot of the many things—staging, lighting, music, timing—that go into a theatrical production, McKay’s version of Welles is by far what makes the film most worth watching, the way Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin did in The Last King of Scotland. McKay, who played Welles in a one-man show, has few film credits, but digs into the role of the erudite, demanding, charming, cruel, womanizing Renaissance man that Welles already had become as he sought to establish his newly formed Mercury Theatre company in New York. So busy (or self-important) was Welles that he used an ambulance to whisk him across town to do his radio show. Efron, having graduated from High School Musical but not, in this role, from high school, is acceptable, perhaps a bit too modern, Danes is better, and James Tupper as Joseph Cotten leads a solid supporting cast, but it is Welles, in his youthful vitality, whose story is most memorable. (Both McKay and Efron look too old for their characters.) Director Richard Linklater (The School of Rock, Fast Food Nation) maintains a light comic tone in adapting a novel by Richard Kaplow.

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viewed 12/7/09 (PFS screening at Ritz 5) and reviewed 12/10/09