These sorts of stories work best when the icon (who also, invariably, turns out to have feet of clay) is a purely fictional person, or at least a famous person barely glimpsed. Bring him on too often and he steals the show.
Which Christian McKay does effortlessly here.
He’s not a perfect match, physically. Welles, who was — want to feel like a slacker? — only 22 when "Julius Caesar" debuted, still had a face rimmed with baby fat. And although McKay does a close approximation of that sonorous voice, it’s only close.
But he gets Welles’ mood right, ever self-absorbed, ever ambitious, ever volatile (there was a reason his theater company was called Mercury). Welles loved characters, but like many geniuses, he wasn’t terribly attuned to people; he would share top billing with Shakespeare, but grabbed credit from everyone else.
He was also, according to this movie — based on a book by New Jersey’s Robert Kaplow — as self-destructive as Shakespeare’s own heroes. His hubris was his own love of crises; they gave him the chance to make an entrance, and triumph. Until, one day, he didn’t, and his career shifted under him like sand.
Yet while this movie gets Welles right, and the communal joy of theater (Linklater has always been good at spotlighting outcast cultures), it gets some other things quite wrong.
One is the New York of the Depression era, re-created here in Great Britain. Unfortunately, the Isle of Man is not Manhattan island, and nothing on-screen quite convinces. Nor does star Zac Efron look like a ’30s teen — for one thing, his hair’s too long — or capture our interest.
He’s supposed to love the theater, yet we never really know why, or how it began, or even what he dreams of — just vague dreams about his liking plays and movies and, you know, songs and things. We watch him getting the chance of a lifetime, and yet we never see him work at it. We never know this boy.
I do, however, know one of the people who have been misrepresented on-screen here, and that’s another problem – and one that "fictional histories" like this seem to incur constantly. Only this time, instead of merely rewriting the dead, they’ve taken on the living.
You see, one of the great triumphs of Welles’ reimagined "Julius Caesar" was the scene portraying the death of Cinna. He was played by Norman Lloyd, who was born in Jersey City and went on to a long career (he played the title role in "Saboteur," Dr. Auschlander on "St. Elsewhere" – and, just recently, the nursing home patient in "In Her Shoes").
The real Norman Lloyd is a devoted husband and an erudite man (I interviewed him two years ago and, although 93 then, he was still going strong). But the movie’s Norman Lloyd — he’s called that by name — is a sloppy vulgarian who looks like a Stooge, sounds like a failed Borscht Belt comedian and chases skirts like an amorous terrier
