Mocking Reality With Andy

Pleased with itself for taking on unusual subject matter, “Man on the Moon” takes pains to introduce us to the strange mind of Andy Kaufman as soon as possible, to thrust us into the Andy Zone without unnecessary delay.

“I am Andy and I would like to thank you for coming to my movie,” Jim Carrey says in the clipped Foreign Man accent that was one of Kaufman’s several personalities. “I wish it was better. It is stupid. Everything is mixed up for dramatic purposes.”

To emphasize his point, Kaufman encourages the audience to leave the theater, even running the film’s final credits to squeaky music played on a tiny portable phonograph. But people don’t leave (although some will wish they had) and Kaufman, switching to what for him is a normal voice, explains that he only did the last bit to “get rid of folks who wouldn’t understand me.” Which, it turns out, may be just about everyone.

Certainly Kaufman, the eccentric 1970s comic who died at the age of 35, couldn’t have asked for a better forum to have his strange ideas on comedy and performing presented to a wide audience. Director Milos Forman and writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are dedicated to the notion that Kaufman was a brilliant visionary, a performance artist before that was a well-known term, years ahead of his peers in his postmodern notion that it was more than OK to have your audience hate you, it was a state close to Nirvana.

Neither could a better choice for the lead role than Carrey even be imagined. Besides sharing a birth date with Kaufman, Carrey is a major fan and seems to have an intuitive understanding of his bizarre subject. His performance is a brilliant, almost terrifying impersonation, and he’s so committed to the role he seems to understand Andy better than Andy did himself.

Starting as a New York nightclub stand-up, so delighted in having an act that is “totally original, no one else is doing it” that he doesn’t notice that more people are walking out than staying, Carrey’s Kaufman is a provocateur, a show-biz anarchist whose mantra is “I’m not a comedian, I don’t do jokes, I don’t even know what’s funny.”

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What Kaufman wants to do most of all is mess with people’s minds, mock their hard-earned sense of reality. The real world was a tenuous concept for him at best (the institutionalized women in “Girl, Interrupted” seem saner than he does), so it’s not surprising that everything was a put-on for Kaufman, that he got so far into his own head he couldn’t get out if he’d wanted to.

Unfortunately for “Man on the Moon,” Kaufman is definitely a person more interesting to hear about than to experience, an acquired taste few will be tempted to acquire. Caring only about amusing himself and fueled by contempt for his audience, Kaufman could be such an unpleasant provocateur that even those closest to him would ask, “Is it an act or are you just addicted to causing trouble?” Not even as consummate a director as Forman and writers who have made a career of heroic portraits of marginal figures (“Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt”) can make us care about someone who could not be bothered to return the favor.

Given how out-there Kaufman was, it’s surprising that “Man on the Moon,” its opening sequence notwithstanding, is structured like a standard “Somebody Up There Likes Me” biopic, with Danny DeVito playing the straightest role of his career as Kaufman’s discoverer and agent, George Shapiro, who utters the classic words, “You’re insane, but you might also be brilliant.”

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It was Shapiro who procured the role that made Kaufman’s national reputation, the lunatic Latka Gravas on television’s “Taxi.” Kaufman, not surprisingly, hated the part and the show, and took his revenge on unsuspecting fans by using a tour of college campuses to read “The Great Gatsby” aloud in a pompous British accent.

Kaufman had a number of safety valves, including transcendental meditation, when the pressures of his borderline sane life got too much for him, and the most obnoxious was Tony Clifton. Given lots of attention here, Clifton was Kaufman’s alter ego, a boorish Las Vegas lounge singer who projected higher levels of abrasive, anti-audience hostility than even Kaufman was willing to express himself.

The ultimate Kaufman situation, allowing him to combine varying levels of role playing, hostility and vanity, was his foray into professional wrestling in general and wrestling with women (he styled himself the World’s Intergender Champion) in particular.

It was in the ring that Kaufman met Lynne Margulies (Courtney Love, beaming a lot), the girl who, despite initial reservations, inevitably ends up looking at him with adoring eyes. “Why do you pretend to be an [expletive]?” she asks at one point, to which Kaufman guilelessly replies, “It’s what I’m good at.”

Given that Kaufman often seemed to be from another planet, “Man on the Moon,” taken from an R.E.M. song about him, seems like a fitting title. If it ever turns out to be true, as some people persist in thinking, that the moon landing was faked somewhere here on Earth, Andy Kaufman would have been the perfect person to pull that off.

* MPAA rating: R for language and brief sexuality/nudity. Times guidelines: a visit to a brothel.

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‘Man on the Moon’

Jim Carrey: Andy Kaufman

Danny DeVito: George Shapiro

Courtney Love: Lynne Margulies

Paul Giamatti: Bob Zmuda

Universal Pictures and Mutual Film Co. present a Jersey Films/Cinehaus production, in association with Shapiro/West Productions, distributed by Universal Pictures. Director Milos Forman. Producers Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher. Executive producers George Shapiro, Howard West, Michael Hausman. Screenplay Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski. Cinematographer Anastas Michos. Editors Christopher Tellefsen, Lynzee Klingman. Costumes Jeffrey Kurland. Music R.E.M. Production design Patrizia Von Brandenstein. Art director James Truesdale. Set decorator Maria Nay. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

In general release throughout Southern California.