It's too bad Me and Orson Welles isn't a great movie. All the reviewers want it to be, and after reading their reviews, so do I. But their takes do leave us with terrific passages on aspiration and storytelling as art. Enough to make you want to see the movie. Or just start thinking.

The NYT kicks me off, with its headline "When a Bombastic Young Man Bestrode the Boards of the Mercury Theater" and an early line that the film "pays tribute to youthful creative ambition where and whenever it may thrive." The last graf is a bookend: "Disenchantment is part of the magic, and Me and Orson Welles strikes a persuasive balance between naïveté and cynicism, both of which are necessary to the theatrical enterprise. Art is a fairy tale we choose to believe in, and this movie, a fiction confected about real people, is too good not to be true."

The New Yorker also looks at the enterprise. "Welles directs as he acts, moving people around between lines, getting them to lower or raise their voices or shape a phrase in a different way. He's like a conductor who points out mistakes while pushing the music forward. And when opening night finally arrives, and we get to see chunks of the production, the old radical theatre ideas still have power."

And the Christian Science Monitor has a graf low in its review that I like but gives away a scene. I don't want to do the same here, so quote a line only, "We think of Welles's legendary self-destructiveness that, here, in nascent form, is already gathering force."

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