Zac Efron is Good at Historical Novel Adaptation

Critics took on the film adaptation of the historical fiction and found few flaws in "Me and Orson Welles".

Photo: Zac Efron is Good at Historical Novel Adaptation

"Me and Orson Welles" — In Richard Linklater's adaptation of novel by Robert Kaplow, starring Christian McKay and Zac Efron.

Welles (Christian McKay) is seen from the perspective of an aspiring teenager, Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who lands a bit part in Welles' 1937 production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" at the Mercury Theatre in New York.

Fame is imminent for Welles, and he knows it. Richard passionately wants to be around theater, movies and music: It's a picture of the artist as a young heartthrob.

Though Efron's fly on-the-wall performance is effortless and confident, it also lacks heft.

Zachary David Alexander "Zac" Efron (born October 18, 1987) is an American actor and singer. He began acting professionally in the early 2000s, and became known to young audiences after his roles in the Disney Channel Original Movie High School Musical, the WB series Summerland, and the 2007 film version of the Broadway musical Hairspray.

McKay, a previously unknown British-born theater actor, has Welles down pat: the ever-shifting eyebrows, the sonorous, arch baritone, the "old man."

Back to the movie review. Though this brisk, amiable film revels in the backstage banter and ramshackle rehearsals of a theater company coming to life, it fails to heed Welles' own advice: "Make 'em sweat."

PG-13 for sexual references and smoking. 114 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four, according to The Associated Press' review.