[In the following review, Romney applauds Forman's casting choices in Man on the Moon, but finds that the film offers no further insight into Andy Kaufman's life.]

To American audiences in the 1970s and 1980s, the comedian Andy Kaufman was a legendary figure whose confrontational routines turned show-business conventions upside down. In Britain, where he was known mainly as the ingratiatingly kooky Latka in the TV sitcom Taxi, Milos Forman's biopic Man on the Moon won't mean quite so much. There's an uncomfortable sense of “you had to be there”: we must take it on trust that Kaufman was a media revolutionary, a pop situationist and a performance artist who used prime-time TV as his medium.

Nevertheless, Kaufman's career remains startling, however accustomed we are today to the wind-up strategies of a Chris Morris. Despite his success in Taxi, Kaufman professed to despise the sitcom itself and showbiz in general; yet he claimed to be a song-and-dance man at heart. He courted affection and loathing in equal measures, finally baiting his audience so thoroughly that he short-circuited his career almost entirely. On the one hand, he would play a childlike clown lip-syncing to the Mighty Mouse theme song; on the other, he spouted outrageous macho rhetoric challenging women to wrestling matches. He devised an alter ego, a foul behemoth of a lounge singer called Tony Clifton, who became an autonomous golem and turned up to disrupt the taping of Taxi. Today's imaginary stars, such as Ali G, barely approach such extremism. People came to assume that Kaufman was having them on when he wasn't. The supreme irony of his life, which the film treats with some poignancy, is that neither the public nor his parents believed him when he announced that he had terminal cancer (he died in 1984).

To reproduce Kaufman's life as a canon of notorious stunts inevitably reduces terrorist strikes to greatest hits. Forman's film does just that, although it feigns not to, presenting itself as a parody of biopic conventions. It plays, sometimes excruciatingly, on the tradition of highlighting significant moments, such as the discovery of Kaufman by the agent George Shapiro. (“Heh, heh, you're insane—but you could also be brilliant!”) But the fact that Shapiro is played by Danny DeVito, Kaufman's co-star in Taxi, is not so much anti-illusionistic as plain cosy. There are too many friends and associates involved—in cameos, as consultants and co-producers—to make this anything other than a friendly tribute.

Jim Carrey is a wildly narcissistic performer who trades on his constant awareness of being watched; this alone makes him an appropriate candidate to play Kaufman, who was similarly never off-air. As far as one can tell, Carrey genuinely transforms himself into Kaufman in both looks and mannerisms. Yet the closer Carrey gets, the more ambivalent the performance becomes: the more he vanishes into Kaufman, the more we see the feat of impersonation, obscuring Kaufman himself. One of Kaufman's best-known routines was as a nervous man of vague foreign origin, who turned out to be a dynamite Elvis impersonator. In the film, this act becomes dizzying: Carrey doing Kaufman doing the foreign man doing Elvis. But finally we just marvel at Carrey's plate-juggling ability to pull off three impersonations at once.

In effect, Carrey wears the Kaufman persona like “an expensive suit”—to quote Being John Malkovich, that incisive commentary on the lure of borrowed identity. In this respect, Man on the Moon is a film of its time: our current entertainment culture, starved for original turns, is morbidly obsessed with off-the-peg appropriations, living holograms of dead acts. The film is of a piece with the fad for pop revivals by proxy, tribute bands doing Abba or The Doors. It is close to, but not nearly as insightful as, Terry Johnson's recent stage and TV evocations of the Carry On team. And it is perhaps closest to the British artist Gavin Turk's sculptures of himself as Sid Vicious and Che Guevara: Forman effectively presents an animated waxwork of Carrey in Kaufman's clothes.

The screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are veterans of such reanimation, having written Tim Burton's Ed Wood and Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt. The raison d'être of such biopics is ironic hindsight, as if nobody had understood at the time that these lives were exemplary American narratives. Man on the Moon successfully presents Kaufman as a tormented package of contradictions, a one-man deconstruction of showmanship and its discontents. Yet the film is neither very entertaining nor illuminating: you come out uncertain whether Kaufman was a genius or a disturbed time-waster. It invokes the inner child, but offers little insight into the adult: we learn that Kaufman was turned on by wrestling women and that he married a nice woman called Lynne (played like an afterthought by Courtney Love and, in real life, a creative consultant on the film). Nor does it reveal much about the folie à deux he shared with his accomplice Bob Zmuda (the co-executive producer).

This is the approved, authorised Kaufman story. He may have been most interesting when demolishing his own charm, but the stunt the film cherishes is a Carnegie Hall spectacular featuring the Rockettes, Santa Claus and milk and cookies for the whole audience. After celebrating his abrasive destroy-all-certainties ethic, the film concludes by revealing that Kaufman was a happy vaudevillian, after all. It's like a Sex Pistols biopic in which Johnny Rotten finally redeems himself as an entertaining guest on Blankety Blank.