If you have not already done so, please see “The Room.” Certain films elicit so much joy they cannot be recommended highly enough. “The Room” is such a film. Not because it is good. No. “The Room” is not a good film. It is bad. Some call it “the best bad movie ever made.” But “bad” does not do it justice. In fact, no adjective I know fully conveys the comprehensive artistic disaster that is “The Room.” Perhaps some Amazonian tribe has a word that means “something so terrible it achieves a certain kind of majesty,” but in English we do not.

What makes “The Room” so very wonderfully, hilariously horrendous? Everything — Every. Single. Thing. The script? Yes. The performances? Yes. The costumes, sets, lighting? Yes, yes, yes. It is the “Citizen Kane” of awful, with the writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau as its bizarro Orson Welles.

Self-financed by Wiseau in 2003 for an estimated $6 million, “The Room” grossed $1,800 in its initial two-week Los Angeles run, with one early review stating, “Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head.” Over the ensuing years, however, a small coterie of film geeks, hipsters and Hollywood insiders discovered “The Room” and became fascinated with the film. They began promoting it to their friends as a cinematic Möbius strip, simultaneously riveting and repellent. DVDs began circulating. Private viewing parties were held. Word spread. Midnight showings transformed into sold-out interactive events à la “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Now, 10 years after its release, “The Room” has achieved bona fide cult success, turning its misguided auteur into the unlikeliest of stars: a thickly accented, heavy-browed leading man whose personal history, nation of origin, age and real name remain unknown, as does the source of his considerable wealth. Like Welles’s Charles Foster Kane, Wiseau is a self-made American success story, a Hollywood creation so fantastic it could only have happened in Tinsel Town.

Now one of the film’s co-stars, Greg Sestero, has written, with the author and journalist Tom Bissell, a memoir of Sestero’s scant acting career and his time with Wiseau before and during the filming of “The Room.” In the film, Sestero plays Mark, best friend and romantic foil to Wiseau’s brooding Johnny. He also served as the film’s line producer despite having no experience in the position and even, as he admits, “no idea what a line producer was.” What he does have is an inexplicable loyalty to Wiseau, whom he first encounters in a San Francisco acting class, performing the role of Stanley Kowalski so badly that “everyone in that basement studio knew they had just witnessed one of the most beautifully, chaotically wrong performances they would ever see.” The two eventually become scene partners, then friends, despite the fact that “beautifully, chaotically wrong” seems to describe not just Wiseau’s acting style, but his entire life, from his filthy apartment to his maniacal outbursts to his delusions of grandiosity. “For me,” he says at one point, “I always wanted to have my own planet. Call it Tommy’s Planet. . . . My planet will be bigger than everything.”