Where’s Tom?

Me and Orson Welles
12A, Nationwide

For a film about drama, Me and Orson Welles — Orson Welles and I? Do we care? — is obstinately undramatic. I kept trying to will it into some kind of life, any kind of life. Come on. You can do it. Think of the children! But it would not be roused. It just plodded on, drearily and leadenly, for the full 114 minutes, like I had nothing better to do, which I didn’t, but that’s not the point. Based on true events, it follows the 22-year-old Welles as he mounts his ground-breaking New York 1937 production of Julius Caesar, but as a film about a famous play it has none of the pizzazz, wit, or invention of, say, a Shakespeare in Love. That, though, did have a script souped up by Tom Stoppard. Tom Stoppard. Where is he when you need him? I had a blocked kitchen sink this morning and could have certainly done with him then.

Adapted by Richard Linklater (School of Rock, Before Sunrise, Fast Food Nation) from the book by Robert Kaplow, the ‘Me’ of the title — the ‘I’? Are we bothering to care yet? — is Richard Samuels, an aspiring young actor who lucks out by managing to blag himself into Welles’s company. This is, yes, also a coming-of-age story, which is fine, but I do wish boys like Richard would come of age quickly. (I have got all day, but that’s not the point either.) Anyway, Richard is played by heart-throbby Zac Efron, star of the High School Musical franchise, and who is said to make teen girls hyperventilate, which is a thing, but not such a big thing. Take a teen girl to the threshold of Topshop and she’ll hyperventilate.