Hey Look James Franco’s Not Playing A Gay Guy In His New Movie

Why be gay in your art when you could be Tommy Wiseau?

The trailer for James Franco’s The Disaster Artist hit YouTube on Tuesday, and, with it, our first real look at the actor/director’s biographical comedy about the making of The Room, aka “one of the worst films ever made.”

The movie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival yesterday and will see a limited release Dec. 1, looks so good, right? Franco’s kind of got all of Wiseau’s Wiseauisms down? Like, YouTube auto-played the trailer into a compilation of The Room’s “Funniest Scenes” right as I opened a new tab, and I honestly thought I was listening to a verbatim reenactment of the original movie’s iconic (!!!!) flower shop scene.

Apparently, looks aren’t deceiving. In his four-star review for The Guardian, East Coast Arts Editor Benjamin Lee called The Disaster Artist, which also features little brother Dave Franco as The Room co-star Greg Sestero, “hysterically funny.”

“[Franco] is staggeringly good here, almost unrecognizable as Wiseau, nailing his strange mannerisms, unusual voice and awkward laugh while also delving deeper to inhabit a man whose deep-rooted insecurities are messily papered over with bravado,” Lee wrote. “It’s easy to laugh at Wiseau, and the film unavoidably does, but it’s harder to make us actually care about him. It’s an affectionately handled portrait of a difficult man, and we share the frustration and sympathy of other characters.”

The critic wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about Franco’s directing, but he did say the guy did “solid work.”

I might be a huge King Cobra apologist (It’s totally in conversation with Guy Hocquenghem’s seminal Homosexual Desire, I swear!!!!), but it’s cool to see Franco take a break from snatching up all the funding for films about queer stuff.