TOMMY, CAN YOU HEAR ME?.......BQ TRIES UNRAVELING THE MASTER OF "DISASTER ARTIST"

              Maybe nobody will ever reach the truth of the impossibly enigmatic Tommy Wiseau, the weirder-than-weird auteur who filmed his dream project, "The Room", now declared as a modern successor to Ed Wood Jr.'s "Plan 9 From Outer Space" as the Official Worst Movie Ever Made.....

                Not that anybody will ever give a shit.......but we have to credit writer-director-actor James Franco for making such a strenuous effort to explore the impenetrable maze of Wiseau,......

                 Ultimately it proves a fool's errand......... Wiseau remains an elusive, practically fictitious character, a man who's dived so deep into his own re-inventions, he exists only in his own head......the living embodiment of the Beatles 'Nowhere Man'.......living in his nowhere land

               Franco can superbly mimic both Wiseau and his catastrophic film.......but he never really gets to the heart his subject,  settling for easy mockery.........as most of the film entertains us with the sight of Wiseau's dumbfounded, flummoxed film crew watching him create his supremely awful epic, with the self-satisfied madness that seems endemic to movie directors.

                We're invited to laugh at Tommy's unhinged behavior while he makes his movie.........but as far as we can see, there's really no difference between Tommy's insane antics directing "The Room" and Michael Bay directing 'Transformers: The Last Knight'.......

                 Neither of them understand the most rudimentary elements of their craft, but consumed with ego, they plow ahead anyway.......oblivious to the unwatchable chaos they wreak.....

                Only once does Franco's "Disaster Artist" script attempt to peel away at least one onion layer off Wiseau, when Tommy is told by an acting coach to pursue a career playing villains, given his mock-Transylvanian accent and mop of long black hair.  (Come to think of it, not bad advice......we could easily imagine Wiseau as a modern day Reggie Nalder, who played the assassin in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and the totally Nosferatu vampire in the "Salem's Lot" mini-series.....)

                Deeply hurt and offended, Franco's Wiseau, in a rare moment of self-reflection, adheres to that Golden Rule of all actors.......no matter how strange and vaguely villainous people may judge him, he's the hero of his own story.

                And is "The Room" really worse than Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space"?

                 Hardly. Wiseau, with a mysterious unlimited amount of cash at his disposal, treated himself to a 6 million dollar budget and a hired cast and crew........Wood barely scraped by with about $60,000  as impoverished as his decaying, dying star, Bela Lugosi........(in effect, Wiseau functioned as both Ed Wood and Lugosi combined........the blatantly incompetent director and his oddball, otherworldly star rolled into one person....)

                  "The Disaster Artist" contents  itself with ridiculing Tommy Wiseau, with only a few stabs at understanding him........and for the witty laughs it provides (coming almost entirely from Seth Rogan's role as the film-within-a-film's long suffering script supervisor), we'll give it 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).  But if  anyone's expecting a film to penetrate the many mysteries of Tommy........this isn't it.