Filmmaker Richard Linklater fictionalizes, mythologizes, the Mercury Theatre’s mounting of a modern-dress Julius Caesar in 1937, the titular “me” being a stagestruck high-schooler who in one week lands a small speaking and singing part in the Broadway production, falls head over heels for the company secretary, sees her stolen out from under him by the titular Orson, gets fired and rehired and refired, falls back on a nicer girl for a happy ending, and at least has something to tell his grandchildren. As a coming-of-age tale, it isn’t much, but as an exhibition of old-fashioned studio filmmaking, luxurious sets and costumes lusciously photographed, it is more than adequate. In eye and in mouth, in glance and in cadence, the unknown British actor Christian McKay magically conjures the Welles we know, although given his age it would be the Welles of, say, The Third Man or Othello. (Other Mercury players we know, Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, Norman Lloyd, are not rendered with such fidelity, or indeed any fidelity, outside of perhaps the choppy waves on Cotten’s head.) It ought to give us serious pause when we calculate to ourselves that the actor who fills the role of the teenager, Zac Efron, is in real life the same age as Welles would have been in 1937, and in that pause we can reflect that we are getting the Welles of myth and legend instead of the Welles of a particular time and place. The performance remains more impression than characterization. Claire Danes, Eddie Marsan, Ben Chaplin, Zoe Kazan. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd