Man on the Moon (1999)

Andy Kaufman: You don't know the real me.
Lynne: There isn't a real you.
Andy Kaufman: Oh yeah, I forgot.

Man on the Moon is a peek into the mind of stand-up comedian Andy Kaufman (Jim Carrey). Except that, we never get to know the real man behind the various personalities that he adopted. The movie starts off with a brief introduction about his childhood wherein we see a socially awkward, yet a stubborn child who had set his mind on being a showman.

After Andy gets fired for playing tasteless songs to a bored audience at a bar, he gets noticed by George Shapiro (Danny de Vito) who takes him under his wing. As the man with an eye for talent says, "You're insane...but you may also be brilliant". Shapiro, who starts off as Andy's manager, would over the years turn into his friend, mentor, protector and apologist. Andy Kaufman always had a way of getting everything as per his demand, and with his alter ego, Tony Clifton, he managed to rile up people just for the sake of it. The movie follows the true accounts of his reading the The Great Gatsby to his bored audience, his inter-gender wrestling matches where he made some misogynistic comments to intentionally annoy his women fans, and also taking his entire audience at Carnegie Hall to treat them with milk and cookies.

He meets Lynne (Courtney Love) at one of those wrestling matches who would go on to be his supportive girlfriend in the future. (A little bit of a digression, but it's an irony that Courtney Love plays the role of a supportive girlfriend after what she allegedly did to Kurt Cobain. Btw, "allegedly" is important here. Not my opinion). We do not get to see the last days of Andy in detail after he gets diagnosed with lung cancer and is surrounded by his close-knit circle consisting of Lynne, Bob (Paul Giamatti), Shapiro and his family members. According to some accounts, his last days at the young age of 35 were one of poverty after staying unemployed for a long time. The final scene of the movie is open-ended which shows Tony Clifton coming back a year after the death of Andy while Bob (who also used to play Tony Clifton) is in the audience. Probably that's to show us exactly what Andy used to tease his audience about - what you see/expect is never what you get.

Milos Forman does a great job of trying to explain the man that was Andy Kaufman. And obviously, there isn't anyone other than Jim Carrey to play that character who could make you laugh or could bore you to tears. Rest of the cast, specially Paul Giamatti and Danny de Vito, give some excellent performances.

Rating - 7.5/10