More Than This

Reviewing the doom of "The Road" and the gloom of Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles."

The temptation to make an orthodox narrative film shouldn’t always be indulged, because too often you’re tempted by the wrong things — pungent prose, say, or, as in the case of Richard Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles,” historical juice.

The latest of at least five features depicting Welles at various chalk points in his iconic career, Linklater’s sprightly, bouncy period farce is all about flavor and sass, which is to say, there’s no clear reason for it to exist. There’s very little story to tell, in any case: the tortured, famed production of Welles’ fascist-uniform “Julius Caesar” at the Mercury Theatre in Manhattan in 1937 is the whirlpool into which a fresh-faced newbie, Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), plunges himself, eager for showbiz and bored with school.

Welles (Christian McKay) impulsively casts the boy as Lucius, and so the kid gets to observe the famed director in full-blown baby artiste mode, splitting his waking hours and inexhaustible ego between bedding women and prodding his troupe to perfect the play he’s rarely on hand to rehearse.

The incidental pleasures aren’t to be dismissed: the look-alike/sound-alike stunt casting (McKay, who’s staged a one-man Welles play, is a spot-on impressionist, while James Tupper is a fascinatingly close parallel-universe version of Joseph Cotten), the period tartness, the riffs on Wellesian tantrum-throwing, the passionate lit-talk, etc.

Efron’s wispy teen is loosely based on Arthur Anderson, who was photographed at 15 playing Lucius’ lute by Cecil Beaton (the inspiration for source novelist Robert Kaplow), but what might’ve trucked along nicely in Kaplow’s fiction idles aimlessly on film, and Linklater cannot stir up a progressive, meaningful froth no matter how hard he tries.

Emphasizing the hollowness of the rookie’s trial-by-Orson story is Efron himself, who’s prettier than Claire Danes (playing Welles’ secretary and sometimes screw toy) and who’s long-lashed, smirking, pristine nothingness made me want to hit him in the face with a shovel. Handily deflating every joke line he’s handed with a bloodless delivery fit only for pillow talk, Efron couldn’t be more of an anomaly in a period film, even one this hammy, or in Linklater’s filmography. (“When you’re on stage, you register!” Welles tells Efron’s Richard, while he might as well tell him his blue eyes are brown.)

McKay, on the other hand, pitches Welles somewhere between Charles Foster Kane and Falstaff, and clearly has a hoot, particularly when “improvising” a paragraph of “The Magnificent Ambersons” into the live performance of a trite radio mystery, the likes of which both fed Welles’ fame and his theatrical experiments.

“Me and Orson Welles” is top-heavy with affection, but scant on enlightenment, and virtually absent of dramatic stakes — but it’s not as if there isn’t a real subject on hand. There is: the work, as Mike Leigh fleshed out so hypnotically in “Topsy Turvy.” But Linklater (and screenwriters Vince and Holly Gent Palmo) skip over the grist of process in favor of comic riffs on thee-tah clichés. The abridged but muscular chunks of “Caesar” we finally do see leave the rest of the film’s flimsy concerns in the dust.

“The Road” and “Me and Orson Welles” are now open in New York and Los Angeles.

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