'Me and Orson Welles': a lighthearted period piece

Filled with jaunty '30s music and fast-talking dialogue, Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles" is an enjoyable if light wallow in scrubbed-clean nostalgia; it's like a Woody Allen period film (you keep thinking "Bullets over Broadway" is taking place around the corner) with a real-life twist. The film is based on a novel by Robert Kaplow, which in turn is based on an irresistible true story: Kaplow found a photo in a university archive from Welles' 1937 Mercury Theatre production of "Julius Caesar," showing the actor/director onstage in full Wellesian emoting — and a young actor next to him, playing the ukulele.

"Me and Orson Welles" is told from the (mostly imagined) point of view of that young man, a high-school kid and would-be actor here named Richard Samuels and played with charming, loose-limbed breeziness by Zac Efron. A chance discussion on a Manhattan sidewalk leads to him being cast in "Julius Caesar," and the kid quickly gets an education: in the theea-tah, in artistic temperament and in women.

The British actor Christian McKay plays Welles marvelously as the larger-than-life scenery-chewer of legend; a man who turns when making a joke to make sure that everybody in the room heard it. He's always performing, and always controlling. "Everything in this show is mine!" he sputters at one point, frustrated by the idea that anybody else might have a say. The cast, including young Richard, bathes in his praise and fears his rage.

Claire Danes, bringing her complicated Cheshire-cat smile, plays an ambitious theater employee who provides Richard with a crash course in love; Zoe Kazan, she of the bottomless blue eyes, is sweetly retro as a girl who's "trying to write a play" and turns out to be a much better match for him. Linklater keeps everything bouncing along, in sepia light and roar-of-the-greasepaint dust, giving us a little lesson in theater history (his depiction of Welles' then daringly modern "Julius Caesar" is carefully researched, based on photographs and descriptions of the original) along with an appealing coming-of-age tale. "They Can't Take That Away From Me" plays on the soundtrack at the end: just the right note, for a young man who's just had the experience of a lifetime.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com