In 1937, The Mercury Theater was just the sort of place where youthful ambition and art love could collide, with funding and direction. Owned by Welles and John Houseman (Eddie Marsan), the Mercury's interpretation of Shakespeare's 'Julius Ceasar' -- with noir trenchcoats and Gestapo uniforms -- would offer a platform for the Welles of Citizen Kane four years later. And in Linklater's film, adapted from Robert Kaplow's novel by Vincent and Holly Gent Palmo, it serves as the unlikely meeting space of Welles and Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), a hopeful teen who impresses the grand wizard by playing a drum roll and singing the Wheaties radio jingle.
This impromptu display of talent inspires Welles, then only 22, to cast Richard in the role of Lucius, Brutus's servant. Sparks then fly when he meets Sonja Jones (a marvelous Claire Danes), the Mercury's secretary, who herself serves Welles and Houseman in the hopes of meeting David O'Selznick. As everything else falls to pieces, they fall for each other...or so Richard believes. Finding a friend in Joseph Cotten (James Tupper) and a cautionary tale in George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin), Richard endures a baptism of sorts into the world of art created by Welles's tyrannical vision.
Linklater, working with production designer Laurence Dorman, gets the look of the time right. He also keeps things moving briskly without sacrificing resonance or thematic complexity. Me and Orson Welles is a film about the early rumblings of an elusive legend covered in the smoke of his own mythology, but it is also a proudly self-reflexive and well-balanced look at how a piece of art is made.
'We're waiting for Orson,' Marsan says often, and one senses that Linklater wants this to reflect not only on the director's impact on modern filmmaking, but also the revelation of who he really was. He wisely leaves that last question wide open: Nothing less than a treatment on-par with I'm Not There would suit such mercurial and complicated a figure as Welles. Linklater's fantastic film does that complexity justice, while also refusing to soften the moral and emotional pitfalls of artistic collaboration. The audience will likely dislike Welles when he refuses to give credit to an exhausted handy man. But then again, did Jackson Pollock give credit to the paint company?
