Me and Orson Welles

MANILA, Philippines - As an icon prone to caricature, Orson Welles ranks right up there with Truman Capote and Ray Charles. But in Me and Orson Welles, our view of the director and thespian isn’t straight on, but a sideways glance. We see him from the perspective of an aspiring teenager, Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who lands a bit part in Welles’ 1937 production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre in New York.

Welles, then 22, had just begun to make a name for himself on radio and on stage with his Voodoo Macbeth, which he set in Haiti. His “Caesar” — “a lean, brutal ‘Caesar,’” as he calls it in the film, set in contemporary Fascist Italy — was a sensation.

Christian McKay, a British theater actor, plays Welles in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, and he clearly has the part down pat — the ever-shifting eyebrows, the sonorous, arch baritone, the “old man.” McKay’s Welles is arresting in its accuracy, though at a certain point its polish keeps Welles under a sheen.