ME AND ORSON WELLES: hitching a ride on the great man's coat-tails

By placing Me first and Orson Welles second in the title director Richard Linklater dares to suggest that me - in the form of Zac Efron as Richard Samuels - is as interesting as, and on an equal footing with, the legendary Orson Welles.
Fat chance.
When measured across the entire span of the great man's life Samuels registers as something rather smaller than a gnat on the hide of an elephant. Even within the considerably narrower confines of this film he is barely more than an annoying buzzing bluebottle.
Ostensibly ME AND ORSON WELLES recounts the experiences of 17 year old would be actor Samuels who lucks into a supporting role in Welles' 1937 Mercury Theatre production of "Julius Caesar."  
This was a year before Welles was to scare the bejesus out of America with his now legendary "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast but he was already a prodigious talent with an ego to match. Samuels quicky discovers that staying in Welles' good graces requires complete compliance with his every instruction and total subservience of personal needs, including girlfriends.
While the story unfolds from Samuels' point of view it's Christian McKay as Welles who dominates the action. McKay is not exactly a Welles look or sound alike but he succeeds in channeling the great man's presence making it reasonably easy to suspend disbelief and believe that this really is him. His interpretation is fully rounded, presenting Welles as an explosive, mercurial and self-centered talent capable of of enormous creativity and cruelty.
Samuels, by contrast, is a rather vapid character, endowed with little depth. He's clearly out of his league compared to the other members of the Mercury Theatre troupe, and the overriding impression is of a child who's climbed out of bed and wandered downstairs to join they party his parents are throwing for their friends. It's difficult to determine whether Efron is acting his socks off or simply playing himself.    
As an avid devotee of the American entertainment industry of the 1930s and 40s I'm a sucker for these kind of recreations of great moments and personalities, but they almost always leave me disappointed. The cinematic re-imagining rarely lives up to the imagining in my mind, which usually plays out in black and white and features the actual stars rather than impressions. I was impressed with McKay's take on Welles but the colour bothered me. Being so thoroughly immersed in black and white movies while growing up I find it difficult to believe in a 1930s America presented in colour. It just doesn't feel real.
This personal reservation aside, ME AND ORSON WELLES is to be admired for putting his name back in front of cinema audiences a quarter of a century after his death, and reminding them (or possibly, informing them for the first time) that there was considerably more to this man than those tv commercials for Paul Masson and the voice of a talking planet in The Transformers movie.