The Disaster Artist’ – Variety. Like such kindred spirits in quantity over quality as Tyler Perry and Joe Swanberg, James Franco has made a crapload of movies. Sooner or later, he was bound to deliver a good one.

But who would have thought his adaptation of Greg Sestero’s “The Disaster Artist,” an outrageous blow- by- blow account of the actor- turned- author’s friendship with the aggressively untalented and infinitely enigmatic creator of one of the worst movies of this century — “The Room” writer- director- star Tommy Wiseau — would turn out to be the best and most professional entry on his own résumé? That’s a claim not without caveats, mind you. The version that world premiered at the South by Southwest film festival was presented as a “work in progress” — where it killed to a room full of “The Room” obsessives, many of whom stuck around for a midnight screening of Wiseau’s disasterpiece. And even though IMDb lists no fewer than 3. Watch Flight Torent Free. Franco (which doesn’t include practically any of his multimedia art projects, from the Sundance- launched live reading of a classic “Three’s Company” episode, to the Berlin gallery- screened short he made wearing a dildo on his nose), the bar had been set pretty low. Franco is a filmmaker whose ideas are nearly always more interesting than their execution, so fans of “The Room” had reason to be concerned when he announced his intention to do “The Disaster Artist.” Would this be just another patience- trying goof from the prolific prankster — a half- baked, fun- to- make movie that audiences would find insufferable to watch?

Fortunately, the answer is: No, “The Disaster Artist” is a real movie, backed by a legitimate studio (Warner Bros. New Line division), featuring a handful of bona fide Oscar nominees, boasting a genuine capacity to delight, whether or not the audiences in question have seen “The Room.” And as a bonus, it makes a fascinating addition to his growing oeuvre of self- immolating performance art.

The most fascinating movie of James Franco's wildly eccentric oeuvre, this studio-made comedy parodies world's most misunderstood filmmaker.

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Just as Johnny Depp gave his career- best performance as Z- movie auteur Ed Wood, Franco achieves what could become his most iconic role — surpassing even “Spring Breakers” rapper Alien — as Tommy Wiseau, international man of mystery. Just who was Wiseau, you ask? When “The Room” opened in June 2. Harlequin Romance cover gone horribly wrong, and who sounds like he might have been raised in Transylvania. Though Wiseau had four- walled two Los Angeles screens to give “The Room” an Oscar- qualifying run, fewer than 2. A withering Variety review blasted “the overall ludicrousness of a film whose primary goal, apparently, is to convince us that the freakish Wiseau is actually a normal, everyday sort of guy.”But then a funny thing happened: Ever so gradually, word got out about just how awful the movie was — how this near- tragic waste of an estimated $6 million budget might be appreciated as an accidental comedy — and audiences started coming to see for themselves. In time, attendees (many of them regulars) got bolder and more cruel, shouting back at the screen and devising routines that transformed Wiseau’s ineptly miscalibrated melodrama into a “Rocky Horror Picture Show”- esque audience- participation phenom.

But as “The Room’s” popularity grew, so too did the questions that surrounded it: Who was its perplexing outsider auteur? Why did every creative decision he’d made on the film seem to contradict how any semi- competent filmmaker might have handled it? And how did he feel about being laughed at for a movie that seemed to take itself so seriously? Granted, Wiseau has unusually thick skin — that much is clear just looking at the leathery actor, whose shield- your- eyes love scenes are the apotheosis of “gratuitous sex and nudity” — but there’s a vulnerability to the man that makes him fascinating. What must it be like to get inside Wiseau’s head?

That is both the genius and central failing of Franco’s “The Disaster Artist” adaptation, which gave the actor the opportunity to spend several weeks lost in character. Co- star Dave Franco, who plays Sestero, claims that his brother disappeared for the duration of production.

Much as he did on his Method- earnest 2. TV James Dean biopic, Franco uncannily reinvents himself in the guise of his subject — this time, for comic, rather than tragic effect. But what insights did he learn while deep inside? And how did he miss the dimension that could make the seemingly alien Wiseau a normal, everyday sort of guy? It’s all there in Sestero’s source material, as the book, however damning, happens to be written by Wiseau’s best friend — arguably the only man on earth who can empathize with and possibly understand the riddle behind “The Room.” Sestero is one of those dime- a- dozen 6’2″ Hollywood hunks with good looks to spare and no acting talent to speak of.

Dave Franco, on the other hand, is Tom Cruise- tiny, an adorable, slightly less stoned- looking Mini- Me version of brother James. Watching them appear side by side, it’s hard not to be distracted by their nearly identical smiles, making it nearly impossible for Franco the elder to exploit the obvious: that Wiseau had some sort of asexual man- crush on Sestero, whom he called “Babyface.”“The Disaster Artist” begins in 1. Sestero (butchering a scene from “Waiting for Godot” in a San Francisco acting class taught by Melanie Griffith — the first of many laugh- on- recognition cameos by screen legends) was dazzled by Wiseau’s epically over- the- top interpretation of the “Stella!” scene from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” delivered in an impossible- to- place European accent. No one else in Sestero’s acting class knew what to make of Wiseau, but Sestero made friends, and the subsequent scenes are as hilarious as one could hope — though somehow lacking in the human dimension.

To this day, Wiseau remains a tragically misunderstood character, drawn to a career for which he is uniquely unsuited. It wasn’t just the accent (he claims to be from New Orleans), or his potato- skin looks (he says he’s Sestero’s age: 1.

Wiseau could barely remember his lines, and when he spoke, the syntax was almost Yoda- like in its peculiar garbling of the English language. The script by “5. Days of Summer” co- writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber doesn’t shy away from moments of abject humiliation, as when an L.

A. acting teacher (Brett Gelman) candidly advises him to abandon his leading- man dreams and instead try to land villain roles: “Have you looked at yourself? You have a malevolent presence,” he tells Wiseau. And then, of course, there’s the film’s eventual premiere, when Wiseau first endures the feeling of having audiences laugh at his work, for which he had bared his soul and burned several million dollars of a fortune whose origins are anybody’s guess (although “such nosy person” Sestero’s best guess in the book, involving a shady business called Street Fashions USA, isn’t even mentioned in the film).“The Disaster Artist” takes a curiously long time to get to the actual making of “The Room,” and one might expect all that lead- up — during which Sestero and Wiseau move to L. A., where they share the latter’s one- room pied à terre — to serve in establishing the foundation for the dysfunctional buddy movie this really ought to be. But somehow, in accentuating Wiseau’s weirdness, Franco overlooks his soul.

From “Foxcatcher” to “Behind the Candelabra,” recent homoerotic biopics have exploited the way that a wealthy, insecure older man goes to incredible lengths to impress the object of his fixation, and while there are a few such scenes (Wiseau’s jealousy rages anytime Sestero’s attention shifts to flirtatious bartender- turned- girlfriend Amber, played by Alison Brie), the movie seems undecided on what makes Wiseau tick: Is it a craving for fame? Watch Cheyenne Autumn Online Freeform. A desire to impress Sestero? Theirs was a textbook Svengali- Trilby relationship, and yet, the dynamic is oddly distorted by Dave Franco’s involvement.