Critics reviews

Franco does show range in his tastes within the circumscribed genre of the classic masculine outré, but his films are where appropriation art has gone to die.

Even the most cursory skim through The Disaster Artist's source book . . . reveals a story far thornier and bizarre than Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber's aggressively one-note adaptation, which eventually sidelines not just Sestero (little brother Dave Franco—cool, meta!), but everyone and everything else that isn't grating antic comedy. Above all, Franco constructs the film as a checklist of painstaking recreations for Roomacolytes.

Seth Rogen plays a script supervisor, but he performs the role of assistant director, which I could believe, and also the role of director, which I guess I could believe because Tommy Wiseau was acting in his own film… but I refuse to believe that the script supervisor was telling Wiseau, his employer, to modify his performance, or pointing out all the famously odd things about THE ROOM. Rogen's role becomes, basically, to explain all the jokes.

Franco casts himself as Wiseau and his younger brother Dave as Sestero. It's the sort of idea that seems at first like a Saturday Night Live skit writ large, but proves in practice more like a performance-art conceit, shaded by dint of the brothers' careful, convincing impersonations of their respective avatars. They render Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero as parts of a fragmented persona, the bland but likeable all-American boy meeting his intense, destabilising, immigrant partner in yearning.

The case could be made that The Disaster Artist is a little too sunny for a movie about a clearly damaged man whose lifelong drive to create something beautiful only led to his becoming a symbol of grand-scale failure. But in addition to making me laugh, hard, at a time when cathartic laughter is all but a medical necessity, this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young weirdo struck me as peculiarly moving.

With his winning adaptation of The Disaster Artist, director/star James Franco follows the model of Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood, approaching Wiseau with a delicate balance of affectionate mockery and a heartfelt appreciation for his creative passion.

How did a story with this much potential get turned into something so unimaginative? Well, for one, because the film couldn't exist without the blessing of Wiseau, who has turned The Room into a cottage industry. . . . The movie bears only faint traces of the book's characterization of the secretive, self-made filmmaker; the exclusion of any biographical details (many of which are now public knowledge) leaves yawning gaps in the script.

The film's ending is a little too neat and subtracts from the movie's rigorously maintained balance of the square and the weird: Wiseau and Sestero experience a friendship-restoring epiphany that their failed melodrama is tremendously entertaining as an inadvertent comedy. But it has the virtue of getting things over with, before a surprise after the credits. Perhaps Franco's two decades of résumé mongering has all along been in the service of harnessing the real freak he had inside all along.

Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, "The Disaster Artist" is a straighter, more obviously commercial-minded project than some of the other movies that Mr. Franco has directed. It's a divertingly funny movie, but its breeziness can also feel overstated, at times glib and a bit of a dodge. . . . Mr. Franco's performance keeps you hooked, in large degree because of its entertaining visual spectacle.

It's engaging, funny, at times touching, and made with the best of intentions, but I felt unusually anxious for much of the film. Even though we know that Wiseau has gleefully accepted and monetized his own humiliation, there's something fundamentally depressing about the spectacle of this man's desperate need to fit in — and his utter inability to do so.

In this comedy directed by and starring James Franco, based on the true story of the production of the cult movie "The Room" (2003), Franco displays a wicked joy in portraying the enigmatic Tommy Wiseau . . . Yet the comedy, for all its scenes of giddy wonder, never gets past Tommy's mask of mystery; avoiding speculation and investigation, it stays on the surface of his public and private shtick, leaving little more than a trail of amusing anecdotes.

In a weird way, it feels like this is the role James Franco – a clearly talented man – was BORN to play. Nobody else could do it. It didn't matter that I wasn't familiar with The Room. Prior knowledge is not necessary. Franco is so hilarious (his portrayal of Tommy Wiseau playing Stanley Kowalski is one for the books), but also manages to find the pathos in this improbable real-life character.