Me and Orson Welles

Me and Orson Welles is an oddity, as its title suggests. It covers a week in the coming of age of a teenage wannabe actor (Zac Efron) who lands a small part in Orson Welles' Mercury Theater production of Caesar. That renowned adaptation of Shakespeare's historical play became part of American theatrical history, and it inspired writer-director Richard Linklater to create this brightly-illuminated self-consciously stagy movie. Or did it?

Linklater isn't a Hollywood stereotype. The Texas-based movie-maker creates unique images, both in acted movies, notably Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and in animated versions of live films, such as A Scanner Darkly. Linklater may well have admired Welles as the ultimate movie industry outsider, but I suspect Christian Mckay was the real inspiration for this period piece.

Linklater saw the English actor at the 2004 Edinburgh Festival, giving a bravura one-man performance in Rosebud : The Lives of Orson Welles. When the director got the funding for his 2008 Welles movie, he reportedly insisted that the unknown Mckay was indispensable. He was; the financiers may have insisted already that the headline star, the "Me", was to be Zac Efron.

Efron is a Prince Charming of Hollywood. On the boards from the age of 11, he twinkled and dimpled on-screen too, from Disney TV to High School Musicals to Hairspray before he was 21. As "Me", he's Richard, a plump-faced 17-year-old who has to convince us that a level-headed stage beauty at least a decade older (Claire Danes) will desire and seduce him, that Welles would identify and care about the youngster's prodigious talents.

Ay, there's the rub. Efron is no embryonic Brad Pitt, who flexed his ingenue acting chops so beguilingly in Thelma and Louise. He's no match for Christian Slater in The Name of the Rose, and he isn't even comparable with young Tom Cruise. Making his tough task tougher, his character's dialogue is hardly credible, ranging from banal boastfulness to fake melodramatics. In one comically incredible scene, when he has to console a young authoress, he scratches the back of his neck. A lot. If it's a tribute to the young Brando, it isn't.

But Mckay as Welles works so well that poor Efron never had a chance to do anything but twinkle wanly. Mckay speaks, looks, breathes, bombasts, flourishes, confides and curses as we instantly sense that Welles himself would have done and been. The accent, vocal resonance and stage presence are spot on. This is beyond impersonation. It's a reincarnation.

For that alone, this film will be part of American movie history. Eddie Izzard and Robert Downey Jr each made Charlie Chaplin re-live on-screen. Mckay is better than them. His Welles will surely be an unrepeatable piece of acting craftsmanship.