By DENNIS LIM


Richard Linklater is keen to point out that his new film, “Me and Orson Welles,” is not a biopic. For starters, he said in a recent phone interview: “Biopics are the lamest genre. No one should attempt them anymore.”

What’s more, when it comes to a figure as protean and elusive as Welles, there are complicating factors. Welles was not only a habitual fabulist - “the most unreliable narrator of his own life,” Mr. Linklater said - but also an outsize subject for the projections of others. His early masterpiece, “Citizen Kane” (1941), is a fittingly prismatic take on the perils of biography, one that leads its reporter character to conclude, “I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.”

Based on a young-adult novel by Robert Kaplow, “Me and Orson Welles,” which opened on November 25 in the United States and will open December 4 in the United Kingdom, restricts itself to a few days in the garrulous company of a 22-year-old Welles, already a theater and radio star, at the height of his productivity.

The year is 1937, and Welles (played by Christian McKay, a British stage actor with only one previous film credit) is fresh off his triumphant all-black staging of “Macbeth.” The wide-eyed perspective comes from the fictional “me” of the title, a teenage theater enthusiast (Zac Efron) who stumbles into a bit part in the modern-dress version of “Julius Caesar” staged by the Mercury Theater, founded by Welles and John Houseman.

Mr. Linklater acknowledged that any portrayal of Welles is bound to spur disagreements. Welles’s biographers differ on whether he was a radical genius who fell victim to a callous studio system or a self-destructive failure who squandered his gifts.

In the spring of 2007 Mr. Linklater saw “Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles,” a one-man show written by Mark Jenkins in which Mr. McKay embodies Welles, and knew right away he had found his Orson.

To prepare for his Welles roles Mr. McKay listened to hundreds of hours of interviews, trying to nail Welles’s singular basso profundo. But while he was alert to physical details, he also wanted to convey less tangible qualities, like his infectious confidence.

“Welles was such a supernova,” Mr. Linklater said. “People think it’s not natural, so they do their part to reduce him: a regression to the mean. But the achievements are too great. You can try, but you can’t really bring him back to earth.”


LIAM DANIEL / Christian McKay as Welles playing Brutus in “Julius Caesar.”