Free Enterprise

Two science fiction obsessives in their thirties are trying to run adult lives and childhood fixations at the same time. One keeps chasing projects that collapse, the other cannot manage a relationship. In a Los Angeles bookshop they run into their hero William Shatner, and the man they meet is not the one they imagined: a middle-aged figure stuck on his own career and pursuing odd projects. The project Shatner is after is a one-man musical version of Julius Caesar. The film's best idea is that Shatner, playing himself, agrees to damage his own legend. He appears not as a hero but as a tiresome and stubborn man, and most of the comedy comes from that. The Caesar number set to a rap arrangement at the close is the moment people remember. The rest is familiar nineties independent-comedy material: a hail of references, likeable losers, a late coming-of-age. It is a film that both loves fandom and scratches at it.