Disaster Artist: portrait of a filmmaker

Farcical film looks at the man behind iconically bad

IN TO this season of the Serious Movie, when every other film seems to speak to the troubled times in which we actually live, the fact-based, yet farcical The Disaster Artist blows like a fresh breeze, throwing open a window through which we may escape, briefly, from ugly reality.

Inspired by the making of the movie The Room – a labour of cinematic ineptitude that has been called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” – this sweet, affectionate (and unapologetically slight) comedy is an all-too-rare homage to harmless, hilarious incompetence, at a time when there is plenty of the more hurtful kind to go around. If it isn’t quite up to the standards of Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s 1994 tribute to the auteur of such misbegotten fruits of moviemaking as Plan 9 from Outer Space, it is nonetheless a much-needed distraction.

For those who don’t know, The Room was the brainchild (for lack of a better word) of one Tommy Wiseau, a mysterious nobody who wrote, directed, produced and starred in the 2003 vanity project, a box office dud that has gone on to become a staple of raucous, soldout midnight screenings. The plot of Wiseau’s movie, to the extent that there is one, concerns nothing more complex than a love triangle. Its hallmarks are wooden performance, bad dialogue, perplexingly random characters and plot points that go nowhere, and protracted, awkward sex, among other flaws.

In The Disaster Artist, James Franco also wears multiple hats, directing, producing and starring as the real-life Tommy, whom he impersonates marvelously, beneath a long,