The Disaster Artist

If you’ve ever spent a Tuesday night at 2:00 AM falling down a YouTube rabbit hole of "best worst movie" clips, you’ve met Tommy Wiseau. He is the man, the myth, and the vaguely European enigma behind The Room, a film so bafflingly incompetent it looped back around to becoming a transcendental experience. When I first heard that James Franco was making a prestige biopic about the production of a movie that features a middle-aged man playing football in a tuxedo, I was skeptical. I actually watched the premiere while wearing a pair of socks that had a hole in the big toe, and honestly, that slight feeling of "something is not quite right here" was the perfect physical manifestation for the experience.

The Man in the Prosthetics

Most biopics about artists focus on geniuses who were misunderstood in their time. The Disaster Artist is different because it’s about a man who is misunderstood precisely because he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. James Franco (who also directed) gives a performance that is honestly terrifying in its accuracy. It would have been so easy to just do a "funny voice" and mock Tommy, but Franco finds the wounded, desperate heart beneath the dyed-black hair and the multiple belts. He captures that specific, marble-mouthed cadence that makes every sentence Tommy utters sound like it’s being translated from a language that doesn't exist.

Opposite him, Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, the "Mark" to Tommy’s "Johnny." Their chemistry is the secret sauce here. It’s a classic "odd couple" story, but with the stakes of a Greek tragedy. Dave Franco brings a necessary groundedness, playing the straight man who is just as seduced by Tommy’s "vampire with a checkbook" energy as the audience is. You see the genuine friendship there, which makes the eventual trainwreck of the production feel like a personal betrayal rather than just a comedy of errors.

A Comedy of Earnest Errors

What I love about this film is how it engages with our current "meme culture" without being cynical. We live in an era where social media can turn a disaster into a phenomenon overnight, and James Franco treats the creation of The Room with the same technical reverence David Fincher might give a thriller. The cinematography by Brandon Trost (who worked on The Interview) mimics the handheld, gritty look of early 2000s indie film, making the absurdity feel grounded in reality.

The supporting cast is a "who’s who" of comedic talent, from Seth Rogen as the increasingly exhausted script supervisor Sandy, to Alison Brie and Ari Graynor. Seth Rogen basically speaks for the audience; every time he sighs or asks why they are filming a scene that makes no sense, he’s saying exactly what I was thinking. There is a specific scene involving a water bottle and a very long "Oh, hi Mark" take that is quite possibly the most uncomfortable twenty minutes of cinema I’ve endured since my last dental cleaning. It’s cringe-comedy elevated to the level of high art.

The Room-verse Lore

The cult of The Room is a specific beast, and the trivia behind this recreation is just as wild as the original film. Apparently, James Franco stayed in character as Tommy the entire time he was directing. Imagine being Seth Rogen and having to take serious directorial notes from a guy wearing three belts and speaking like a space alien—it sounds like a fever dream.

Here are a few of the nuggets that make this production so fascinating to me:

Tommy Wiseau actually has a cameo in the post-credits scene, but he’s playing a completely different character, which is the most Tommy thing imaginable. The production design team had to build exact replicas of The Room’s sets, including that infamous roof with the green-screen skyline, because the original sets were long gone. The real Greg Sestero was heavily involved, and the script by Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter (the duo behind 500 Days of Summer) was adapted from Greg’s own memoir. James Franco’s prosthetic transformation took about two hours every morning, and Tommy Wiseau reportedly said the lighting in the film's first scene was "off," despite approving almost everything else. The film actually features a cameo from Bryan Cranston playing himself in a flashback to his Malcolm in the Middle* days, which serves as a cruel reminder of how Hollywood actually works versus how Tommy thinks it works.

Ultimately, The Disaster Artist is a love letter to anyone who has ever had a dream that was significantly larger than their talent. It’s a drama about the loneliness of being an outsider and a comedy about the hubris of the wealthy. I didn't expect to feel bad for a man who spent $6 million of mystery money to make a movie where he throws a football from three feet away, but here we are. It’s a hilarious, touching, and deeply weird look at the dark side of the Hollywood dream that manages to be better than the movie it’s about—which, let's be honest, wasn't a very high bar to clear.