Features > Movie Reviews > Me and Orson…

And so it is in Richard Linklater?s rather good, highly congenial footnote to a legendary career.

An unofficial companion piece to Tim Robbins’ The Cradle Will Rock (but in most respects superior), Me and Orson Welles recreates the 22-year-old wunderkind’s first Broadway production, a modern dress production of Julius Caesar styled to comment on European fascism (this was 1937).

That sounds deadly dry and academic, I know, but the perspective dreamed up by novelist Robert Kaplow gives us more than a front row seat. Schoolboy Robert (capably played by teen heartthrob Zac Efron) is not so very much younger than Orson, and ambitious – and romantic – enough that when he stumbles into Welles’ orbit, he’s ready and willing to ditch school and accept a bit part, even if it means learning to strum the lute in a little less than a week.

The proximity of the lovely Sonja (Claire Danes) – assistant to Welles’ producing partner John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) – is the icing on the cake.

Richard’s journey from enraptured excitement and optimism to painful disillusionment is predictable enough – it parallels the journey Joseph Cotton?s characters take as they get to know Welles’s ways better in Citizen Kane and The Third Man. But just because you know which way the wind is blowing, it doesn’t make it any less exhilarating to breathe it in.

Filmed, cheaply of course, on the Isle of Man, Me and Orson Welles doesn’t give us much in the way of decorative splendour. But the film has two great assets. To reverse their importance in the manner of that title: it gives us a fascinating glimpse of what Welles’ radically reimagined Caesar may have looked like. And it recalls the great director in his youthful prime, decades before this gourmand’s girth got the better of him.

English actor Christian McKay channels Welles with uncanny plenitude. He absolutely gets him: the supreme self-confidence, the reckless bravado and absolute conviction that art is at the centre of everything… the erudition and eloquence… the awful neediness… the callous cruelty and pettiness… and the monstrous ego that underpinned all his prodigious achievements and all his myriad failures.

If he does nothing else in his career (and his filmography is almost non-existent so far) McKay must know he’s been blessed with the role of a lifetime, and done it justice too.

Linklater makes merry hay with the chaotic last-week rehearsals that somehow turn out all right on the night, and only missteps when he plumps for an upbeat ending with a faintly sappy ring to it.

Any self-respecting film (and theatre) buff will find loads to enjoy here, and even if you don’t know your Welles from your elbow this might just serve as a gentle prod in the right direction…