[In the following review, Sterritt dismisses the negative critical response to Man on the Moon, arguing that the film is both thought-provoking and mischievous.]

Man on the Moon joined the list of 1999's most misunderstood movies within hours of its first press screenings, as assorted critics started complaining they'd been cheated of the Andy Kaufman biopic they'd apparently come to see. The film's lukewarm box-office reception probably had a similar cause, abetted by lingering memories of Kaufman's actual career, which still conjures up extremely mixed vibes in the popular imagination. Universal Pictures didn't help, promoting the movie with publicity stunts designed to merge Jim Carrey's star power with Kaufman's own persona—a peculiar decision, considering Kaufman's rocky relationship with the public, not to mention the fact that Carrey's younger devotees aren't likely to have much awareness of Kaufman beyond Taxi reruns on late-night television. Nor did Universal give Man on the Moon an effective launch on the film-festival circuit. This was an obvious option, given the auteur eminence of director Milos Forman and the precedent of his previous picture, The People vs. Larry Flynt, opening the New York film-fest in 1997. But the studio apparently feared that any trace of ‘art-film’ stigmata might scare away Carrey fans before they had a chance to line up on opening weekend.

The result was a lackluster showing on all fronts for a serious, ambitious movie that deserves more thoughtful attention. To confront the most glaring misperception first, Man on the Moon is no more a biopic than Solaris is a space opera. It doesn't fail to show the ‘real’ Andy Kaufman and reveal what ‘made him tick.’ It takes virtually no interest in those tasks, focusing instead on the substance of his trailblazing work—his radical challenge of entertainment norms as a performance artist avant la lettre who had the audacity to conduct his experiments in the populist arenas of comedy clubs and commercial TV.

Since the movie's value rests on its faithfulness to the spirit (if not always the specifics) of Kaufman's career, a bit of synopsis is in order here. Kaufman climbed the comedy-club ladder in the early Seventies, gaining his first national attention on Saturday Night Live in 1975. Acquiring a following and an agent, he joined the fledgling Taxi sitcom, where he turned the Foreign Man character from his stand-up act into Latka Gravas, a mechanic who makes up in amiability what he lacks in language skills. This confirmed Kaufman as a mainstream success by industry standards but an Establishment sell-out by his own. He soon reasserted his orneriness by inventing “intergender wrestling” and becoming the self-declared bad guy of the sport, pushing the envelope of professional wrestling's already dubious show-biz conventions. He also played the nightclub circuit in the guise of Tony Clifton, his uproariously obnoxious alter ego. As satirical as they clearly were, these deliberately abrasive moves caused great con fusion among Kaufman's erstwhile admirers and nearly wrecked his career. He died in 1984 from large-cell carcinoma, an uncommon form of lung cancer. He was 35 and a nonsmoker.

Man on the Moon begins with a comic disclaimer vis-á-vis its fidelity to the facts: Speaking to the camera, Carrey/Kaufman/Foreign Man complains of changes made in the story “for dramatic purposes,” noting “all the baloney” these have brought into the picture. This won't persuade Kaufman loyalists to overlook the movie's most flagrant rearrangements of the record, but what matters in the film is less its journalistic accuracy than its commitment to the cultural resonances of his work. Here it excels by virtue of Forman's efficient stylistics, Carrey's surprisingly nuanced performance, and the ingenious mise-en-abime structure devised by screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, whose previous pictures include Tim Burton's admirable Ed Wood and Forman's own Larry Flynt epic.

Just as Man on the Moon has been underrated by critics mistaking it for a biopic, Kaufman's career was undervalued by audiences mistaking him for a comedian. He resisted this, but the label he preferred—“song and dance man”—was even further off the mark, as he surely (and mischievously) knew. In actuality he was, as I've suggested above, a performance artist whose laboratory was the art-unfriendly world of mainstream entertainment, and whose obsessions were more far-reachingly subversive than that world could begin to comprehend, much less put up with.

His career had clear ties with comedy, of course, and one important aspect of his work was its bold refiguring of stand-up comedy conventions. The dominant style of middlebrow-to-highbrow comedy in the Fifties and Sixties, from Steve Allen and Mort Sahl to Jean Shepherd and Lenny Bruce, relied on making the audience into co-conspirators with the comedian, sharing a nebulous sort of hipness that contrasted with the out-group squareness of everyone not in the room. Kaufman discombobulated this pattern with a vengeance, largely by keeping his audience in a state of continual uncertainty as to what in the world he might do next. Questions of the most basic kind—Is he kidding? Is this part of the act? Is the show over yet?—moved from the margins to center stage, and stayed there for disconcertingly long stretches of time. Not surprisingly, this drove spectators crazy, and not surprisingly, Kaufman took that as a triumph. “This is the hippest audience in television,” says Kaufman's agent in Man on the Moon, telling his client that even Saturday Night Live viewers want nothing more to do with him. Kaufman gets the message, but the movie has taught us that he's secretly thrilled at such events. He's made people feel, and what they feel is almost beside the point.

Kaufman's desire to rework the dynamics of comedy is one facet of his interest in what performance theorists call “breaking frame,” which has a long pedigree, from Dada and Surrealism to performance art per se. This tradition was very much alive in the Sixties, when Kaufman was crystallizing his ideas as a teenager, and it produced an explosion of innovative concepts in the Seventies, the very decade when Kaufman made his first public impact. Its practices are often associated with boundary-blurring uses of the performative body, which is precisely what Kaufman specialized in as he confounded speech and action with silence and stillness; merged performance spaces with the outside world; and refused to distinguish a ‘real’ self from an ‘acting’ self, to the point where his most hyperbolic fans reportedly saw his death as the last and best prank of an unstoppable artist who'd turned indeterminacy into the ultimate expressive form.

I won't claim that Man on the Moon is as radical or resolute as the work it celebrates, but Alexander and Karaszewski have been remarkably successful at weaving Kaufman's sensibility into their screenplay, using intermittent appearances by his Tony Clifton character to muddle the lines between performative reality, biographical reality, socio-cultural reality, and various combinations thereof. Carrey provides brilliant support for their endeavor in at least three ways: his portrayal of Kaufman is uncannily accurate; his childish demeanor foregrounds Kaufman's subtextual messages about the persistence of infantile traits in adult thought and behavior; and his fitful efforts to broaden his own career (e.g., The Truman Show) lend poignancy to his depiction of a colleague who found a different kind of slippage between professional and personal goals. Lest his acting be dismissed as mere impersonation, I hasten to add that Carrey has crafted a genuinely creative portrait that interprets aspects of Kaufman's personality in unexpected ways. Compare his Tony Clifton with Kaufman's, for instance, and observe how Carrey adds a forward-thrusting neckline that combines with a fiercely jutting lower lip to suggest a grueling self-satisfaction that Kaufman himself didn't conjure up quite so ferociously.

I suspect much of the resistance to Man on the Moon has stemmed from its refusal to provide such conventional pleasures as a reassuring biopic format and production values as spiffy as the show-biz milieu that Kaufman inhabited. I further suspect Kaufman would have been pleased with it. It's often been noted that comedians are less interested in wooing their audiences than subduing them, and Kaufman carried this also to extremes, unmasking the sadomasochistic components of comic performance as few other American entertainers have done. He turned the well-timed tease (He's on the stage—why isn't he saying anything yet?) into the finely tuned torture (He's really insulting that guy—is it part of the act?) and savored the discomfort this brought on everyone concerned.

Man on the Moon seems methodically in league with his irascible agenda, from the sitcom-style flatness of Anastas Michos's cinematography to the over-the-top edginess of its wrestling sequences; even the ready-made nostalgia of the Taxi scenes are calculated to shrivel our romance-hungry souls with their views of a desperately aging Judd Hirsch and Christopher Lloyd cavorting on the tackiest set you ever saw. It's a spectacle only Tony Clifton could love, and here it is in a Jim Carrey picture that Universal itself couldn't figure out how to sell. Oh, yes, Kaufman would have cheered.