One of my favorite films of the year is not just a film, but a piece of performance art. 

James Franco directs The Disaster Artist, which chronicles the making of the cult film The Room, dubbed the “Citizen Kane of bad films.” With that premise, Franco manages to weave a heartfelt story out of something stranger than fiction.

Both The Room and The Disaster Artist have surreal Bay Area roots. The writer, director, producer, and star of The Room is Tommy Wiseau, who is a mystery unto himself.  Wiseau has what sounds like a thick  Eastern European accent, though for the longest time he claimed he was an All-American boy from New Orleans. He claimed he was in his mid-20s while filming The Room, and although lying about your age is pretty typical for actors, any photo of him from the film shows how laughably false that was.

In 1998, in an acting class in San Francisco, Wiseau met 19-year-old actor Greg Sestero from Walnut Creek. Through events more bizarre than fiction, the two ended up moving to LA together to pursue their dreams. Wiseau went on to write, direct, produce and star in The Room as Johnny, a banker from San Francisco. He cast Sestero as Mark.

The film went on to be a cult classic of worst movies ever made. Take the set, for example. The entire film takes place in San Francisco but is filmed in Los Angeles. Check out the famous “I did not hit her” scene to see some of the worst green screen work of the San Francisco skyline.

Of course, The Room was a total flop at the box office. It cost $6 million of Wiseau’s own money to make and only made $1,800 during its theatrical run. How he procured the funds is another enigma. Wiseau even paid to keep it in theaters for 2 weeks in order to qualify it for Academy Award nominations (remember that for later).

But incredibly, over the last 15 years, the film found its audience. Audiences now go and engage in Rocky Horror Picture Show-type participation, with prompts to yell back at the screen, spoons to throw (yes, spoons), and more. I myself discovered the film in the late 00’s and have probably seen it more times than I should admit.

In 2013 Greg Sestero wrote a book called The Disaster Artist chronicling the making of The Room and his friendship with Wiseau. The book ended up in the hands of another Bay Area native, James Franco, who hails from Palo Alto, who at the time hadn’t seen The Room. He decided to adapt it into a film, and cast his younger brother, Dave, as Sestero.

The result is a beautiful meta piece of art. It’s a film, based on a book, about the making of a film. The performances are scary good. James Franco captures Wiseau’s accent, gestures, and mannerisms dead on. He has the best facial prosthetic makeup I’ve seen in a considerable amount of time, but most importantly, he manages to humanize a character/person that I think a lot of people just see as a caricature.

It would have been easy for Franco to make fun of Wiseau, but what makes both The Room and The Disaster Artist memorable is their earnestness. Wiseau didn’t set out to make a bad movie, and that has been what draws audiences to this day. The Disaster Artist doesn’t set out to make ridicule The Room (there’s so much care put into recreating scenes from the original film, and a parody wouldn’t have bothered).

In what I think would be a beautiful artistic cherry on top, I can absolutely see James Franco receiving an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Wiseau, thus, in a way, fulfilling Wiseau’s intentions for the original theatrical run of The Room.