Make room for a classic

SEEING The Room for the first time remains one of the most hilarious movie-going experiences of my life.

Sitting in the cinema, throwing plastic spoons at the screen, booing the terrible dialogue, making gagging noises during the repulsive sex scenes and generally ridiculing and heckling this unspeakably bad movie was simply brilliant fun.

And now, 14 years after Tommy Wiseau’s appalling vanity project hit screens for the first time, the perfect companion film has finally arrived: The Disaster Artist.

Based on the tell-all book by Greg Sestero (one of the unfortunate actors attached to The Room in 2003), it is a behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of this terrible movie and the bizarre man who created it.

Greg (Dave Franco) is a struggling actor in San Francisco who strikes up an unlikely friendship with someone else in his acting class: a long-haired, foreignaccented oddball named Tommy Wiseau (James Franco).

While Tommy is clearly no great actor, Greg is nonetheless drawn to Tommy’s fearless (perhaps delusional) self-confidence. Determined to make it big, they move to Los Angeles in search of fame on the silver screen, but of course things are not that simple.

So, naturally, Tommy decides to write, direct, produce and star in his own movie: The Room. And he wants Greg to star in it alongside him.

Greg agrees, but as the production of The Room lurches from one farce to the next, he very quickly comes to regret the decision.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with The Room, it might be possible to just laugh at this comedy about a weirdo making a really bad movie. But you will certainly find a lot more enjoyment in The Disaster Artist if you know your way around The Room and the cult status it has attained in recent years.

Because the real gag here is that The Room really exists and this movie is not exaggerating how bad it really was. It was worse.

The Disaster Artist is essentially one long in-joke, frequently referencing that list of rules and heckling opportunities from the midnight screenings.

All those seminal moments of atrocious cinema that you will know from The Room are lovingly preserved and reproduced here, and when you see them playing out in the context of the film shoot, they are even funnier.

Tommy’s infamous rooftop entry scene (which took most of a day to shoot because he couldn’t remember his lines — which he wrote), those unspeakably uncomfortable sex scenes, the actors trying to stay afloat in a sea of bad dialogue, and the first time we see Tommy and Greg tossing a football, all presented perfectly.

The shot-for-shot recreation of scenes from the original movie is immaculate. Just before the credits they show several scenes side by side, from the original and the reshoot, and it is nothing short of remarkable.

James Franco, who is a fan of both The Room and Sestero’s book about the surreal production experience, both directs this movie and stars as Tommy Wiseau (one of many bizarre metadramatic ironies in this film).

And his mimicry of Wiseau is so spot-on it is unsettling. That unidentifiable accent, the robot laugh, that strange backtilted posture of his face with its slack expression and lazy eye, every detail is eerily perfect.

The casting is pitch-perfect across the board, which becomes so vital in those on-set scenes where you get to witness the growing horror being experienced by the cast and crew as the shocking realisation dawns on them that this movie ain’t gonna be great.

Franco has mined some surprisingly emotional material from this story as well. Possibly the film’s greatest achievement is that it makes you feel something for Tommy Wiseau.

The real Wiseau is a true enigma. Nobody knows exactly where he or his seemingly endless fortune come from. He hides whatever real personality he has behind so many layers of strange artificiality and carefully constructed veneer and weirdness that it is almost impossible to get a read on what is actually happening inside his brain. He is like an alien with a persecution complex that landed on Earth and is doing a terrible job of trying to blend in.

Yet this film somehow elicits a real sympathy for Wiseau. In particular, his moment of realisation that his film is a laughing stock is crushing. It is the one point where you will actually stop laughing at how bad The Room is, and that is a powerful achievement.

Even more surprisingly, this movie was made with Wiseau’s blessing. He even has a cameo in what must be the most surreal post-credits scene I’ve ever seen.

The Disaster Artist has to be the best tribute to a bad movie that is ever likely to be produced. I haven’t laughed that hard since I first saw The Room.

Tommy Wiseau paid to keep his flop of a film showing on a cinema screen for two straight weeks to make sure it would qualify for Oscar nomination. Obviously, it wasn’t nominated for one.

But the irony is that this farcical comedy about the making of The Room just might win that Oscar. And I’m sure Wiseau will take credit for it if it happens. And we won’t mind.