The Disaster Artist Review

What a story.


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The Disaster Artist is a movie where you are either going to go into it incredibly biased or not. If you're one of the legion of fans of The Room, one of the worst movies ever made that is so laughably horrible, then there's almost no reason for you not to go see this movie. You're going to like it and some of the performances and scenes are going to make you smile like a giddy school girl.

That being said, for everyone else that has never seen The Room or just wants to know if this is a movie that's worth seeing because it's a good movie, that's a bit trickier to say. It's not that The Disaster Artist, the based on a true story making of The Room, is a bad movie, far from it. The problem comes when the movie jumps around a fair bit more than you would expect it to. That's not inherently a bad thing mind you, but you'll definitely notice that you'll enjoy some parts of the movie way more than others.

I still recommend seeing it though just for the sheer spectacle of it all.

The Disaster Artist stars Dave and James Franco, who play Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau respectively. Greg lives in San Francisco and always wanted to become an actor. After he meets Tommy, a man of mystery with unlimited money and an unknown nationality or age, they both move down to LA to find fame. Greg is able to get some small gigs, but Tommy... not so much, which causes Tommy to decide to write, direct, produce, and star in his own movie, The Room. What follows is a story about passion, paranoia, and whatever the hell Tommy saw in his movie.

If you are to see this movie for one reason, see it for James Franco as Tommy Wiseau. Franco captures some bizarre oddity where we have no idea what he is, let alone what he's supposed to be. I've never been so confused about watching a character in a movie than here, and it works on so many levels. There's just something so watchable about Tommy and he steals every scene that he's in. When he's just reading a line for an audition, he makes it so compelling in the worst possible way. Whenever he isn't on screen, it honestly feels like a part of The Disaster Artist lost its soul.

Everyone else does a fine job, but when you see Dave Franco as Greg Sestero, there are some moments that are just uncanny how similar he is the the actual man. That probably would be the best word to describe this movie; uncanny. It's uncanny how similar these people act. It's uncanny how some scenes from The Room are recreated here. It's uncanny just how in depth the movie goes into recreating certain character moments. I had a permanent grin on during those moments, but only because I was familiar with The Room. It's not until the very end when you see side by side shots of the original movie and The Disaster Artist version of it that the uninitiated can understand what's happening, but that's literally at the very end of the movie. It's a pretty big commitment to make.

That's an even bigger hurdle for some because the movie takes a long time to really get going. It's not until about a half hour or so into the movie that we get into the production of The Room, making all of the earlier stuff just kind of... there. Nothing from the first third ever gets brought up again and nothing from the beginning really matters much in the grand scheme of things. Sure, we need time to establish a relationship between Greg and Tommy, but some moments could have definitely been cut down in favor of taking a stronger look at the actual production.

For every actor that isn't the main duo, they're... okay. Just okay. This is a Franco movie at the end of the day and you can tell that this was James Franco's passion project. They're on screen for most of the time, so it's never really a problem, but it can get pretty bothersome when we get into the production of The Room. The biggest reason is that for all of the praise that I will give Dave Franco for portraying Greg in the movie, he comes across more as a Denny than a Greg. Only original fans of The Room will understand this, and most likely no one will notice or care about this, but whenever he was alone with Tommy and not on set, his tone and cadence were more similar to Denny, the squirmy and young teenager than the mature and adult Greg.

Whenever The Disaster Artist is away from The Room, the movie is just a standard, middle of the road made for TV making of movie if that makes any sense. It just seems like a movie that you've seen plenty of times before about people going to LA and trying to make it big. When The Disaster Artist focuses on the making of the worst movie ever made, the movie can finally become something special, and it focuses on that for the majority of the movie when it finally kicks into high gear, but away from it the movie becomes alright at worst.

Will The Disaster Artist be nominated for Oscars? I think so. I think there's a strong chance that Franco will be nominated for Best Actor and a 100% chance that this movie will be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Now Best Picture? There's a slight chance, but it honestly may or may not happen. I can see why some people would fawn over The Disaster Artist and that Oscar voters usually go for movies like this, but I think it's too bizarre for its own good, and that's coming from a guy who thinks that The Shape of Water has a phenomenal chance at winning.

So at the end of the day, The Room fans will think this is one of the best movies of the year. Everyone else will be somewhat satisfied with it. I think that I fall somewhere in the middle here. I think that this is a totally fun movie and I certainly did enjoy it, but there were other moments where I was just content. Nothing bad happened in this movie and there was nothing that made me think that Franco made a bad decision or a bad acting choice, but I can't say it's a movie that rocks my socks off. It was a solid adaptation from a great book based off a terrible movie at the end of the day, and that's all I really could have asked for.