Me and Orson Welles

New York, 1937. Richard, a high school kid with more nerve than plan, wanders past the Mercury Theatre, runs into Orson Welles on the sidewalk, and talks his way into a small part in the company's Julius Caesar. Welles is twenty two. He is staging Caesar in fascist uniforms, and the only thing holding the production together is his own appetite. Richard Linklater directs. Zac Efron plays Richard, Claire Danes plays Sonja, who runs the theatre's practical life, and Christian McKay plays Welles. McKay is the reason the film exists in the shape it does. He had been playing Welles in a one man stage show called Rosebud, and Linklater cast him out of it. What he does is not an impression of the voice so much as an impression of the temperament: the way Welles could flatter and humiliate inside a single sentence. The Mercury interiors were not built in New York. The production shot on the Isle of Man and at the Gaiety Theatre in Douglas. It premiered at Toronto in 2008 and then sat, struggling to find a US distributor, until a late 2009 release. Against a budget of roughly 25 million dollars it took around 3 million worldwide. McKay collected a string of nominations, including a BAFTA nod for supporting actor. Who it is for: anyone drawn to backstage life, to 1930s New York, and to the moment the Welles legend was still being invented. Who it is not for: Efron's character is essentially a witness, and the story has no weight of its own. If the man at the centre does not interest you, the film has nowhere to go.