In Discovering Orson Welles, Jonathan Rosenbaum's excellent collection of Welles-related essays, Rosenbaum devotes a number of chapters to critiques of Welles biographies. He roughly divides the texts between those sympathetic to Welles and those more harshly critical, as well as making the distinction between biographers who knew Welles personally and ones who did not. What emerges is a dizzying variety of Welleses, including, in the essential This Is Orson Welles (interviews conducted by Peter Bogdanovich), the Man Himself, whose reflective and relatively easy-going manner later in life doesn't in itself debunk any legends of the enfant terrible of War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane.
Thankfully, Richard Linklater's thoroughly invigorating Me and Orson Welles isn't a sprawling Welles biopic. In fact, Welles is technically, purposefully something of a supporting character in this story of a high school student with acting ambitions who lands himself a small part in Welles' famous, fascism-skewing 1937 Julius Caesar production. Purposefully, because Welles is (no pun intended, I swear) simply too big for one film or one book--or even two or three books, as evidenced by Simon Callow's admirable yet flawed multi-volume project--to encompass. While both as an artist and as a man Welles seems to somehow grow more fascinating with each passing year, The Magnificent Ambersons and Chimes at Midnight--not to mention the numerous partially completed Welles projects lingering in limbo--remain vastly more edifying than any biography or biopic could ever hope to be.
All that said, Christian McKay's performance is downright eerie. Miles from passable takes like Liev Schreiber's broody Welles in RKO 281 or Vincent D'Onfrio's cameo Welles in Ed Wood, McKay is, at once, both Welles-as-Charles-Foster-Kane (with a few years' age and experience convincingly subtracted) and Welles as you can't help but imagine him while reading those above-mentioned biographies: tremendously ambitious, roguishly charming, and hyper-aware of his own singular brilliance; think: Kanye West before Kanye West, including a political outspokenness that Linklater avoids a little too neatly. So dead-on is McKay's turn that at a couple different points in the film, I actually had to remind myself that I was watching an actor playing Welles and not some miraculously unearthed archival footage of the real O.W. directing Caesar.
McKay owns every scene he's in. He doesn't, however, own the movie. This is very much a quintessential Linklater film--talky, sweet-not-sugary, bursting with growing pains not unlike those of Jesse, Celine, or the cast of Dazed and Confused. If the period detail and magnetism of McKay's Welles inevitably dilute the romantic urgency here, signature Linklater themes--chance encounters and brief stretches of the extraordinary dramatically shaping and coloring the course of a life, the liberating potential of artistic expression, etc.--nevertheless shine through.
And while McKay steals the show, Zach Efron (following good work in the better-than-you'd-assume 17 Again) proves a more than capable young talent; Claire Danes has, perhaps, never been than better than as a Welles assistant with ambitions of her own. When Efron's Richard reacts heartbrokenly that his "girlfriend" is shacking up with the married Welles, Danes' Sonja reminds him that they've only known one another for a week. "This week has changed my life," he shoots back, dropping the cool-kid demeanor he's carefully cultivated and sounding a heck of a lot like Ethan Hawke's Jesse a decade and a half ago--or character-wise, almost sixty years later. When a closer-in-age other-Efron-love-interest recites "Ode on a Grecian Urn," it sounds rather like a working mantra for a filmmaker as indefatigably romantic as romance itself is indefatigable.
