Me and Orson Welles could be seen as the movie in which Zac Efron transitions from high school musicals to art house films, but it's likely to garner even more attention as the arrival of British performer Christian McKay.... more » For this handsome-looking historical fiction, Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise) adapts Robert Kaplow's coming-of-age novel about actor-director Orson Welles's 1937 modern-dress version of Julius Caesar (with McKay as the 22-year-old Welles). Fact meets fiction in the person of 17-year-old Richard (Efron), who lucks into the part of Lucius during a visit to Manhattan, where the New Jersey high school senior ends up rubbing shoulders with members of the famed Mercury Players, namely John Houseman (Eddie Marsan), George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin), and Joseph Cotten (James Tupper, a dead ringer for the Citizen Kane star). He also meets two women who spark his imagination: Gretta (Zoe Kazan), a short-story writer who dreams of publication in The New Yorker, and Sonja (Claire Danes), Welles's attractive--and dangerously ambitious--production assistant. Richard's colleagues warn him not to cross the boy wonder or to pursue Sonja, but he ends up doing just that (even though the age-appropriate Gretta is clearly the more sensible match). By the end, he learns some hard lessons about theater politics, temperamental geniuses, and, well, life. If Efron acquits himself nicely, the mellifluous McKay, veteran of the one-man show Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, quietly and forcefully steals every scene he's in with a performance that transcends mere mimicry in capturing a towering figure's terrifying complexity. --Kathleen C. Fennessy« less