“The Disaster Artist,” directed by James Franco, is a movie about the making of a movie by someone whose life was already a work of creative imagination long before he got behind the camera. It’s a version of the real-life story of Tommy Wiseau (played by Franco), an aspiring actor in San Francisco in the late nineties, who takes an acting-class friend, Greg Sestero (Dave Franco), along to Los Angeles in pursuit of stardom. In 2002, with their careers going nowhere, Tommy, with Greg’s help, makes a movie called “The Room,” which is a comedy of errors during the production. It becomes an object of derision at its première—and, soon, mockingly celebrated for its unmatched badness, it becomes a cult classic. (“The Room” plays often—including next weekend—in late-night screenings at the Sunshine, on the Lower East Side.)

The real-life Wiseau is a man of mystery. His accent and his garbled grammar, as heard in “The Room” and as imitated by Franco in “The Disaster Artist,” are vaguely Eastern European. The real-life Wiseau, echoed by the movie’s Tommy, has claimed to be from New Orleans. But, as stated in a title card in “The Disaster Artist,” it’s not known where the real-life Wiseau is from, how old he is, or where he got his money. There are reports that he was born in Poland in 1955, and he has given various accounts of where his money comes from (in one version, real estate; in another, the garment industry). “The Disaster Artist,” based on a memoir by Sestero, has the virtue of depicting the character of Tommy (as distinguished from the real-life Wiseau) as a character, a work of conspicuous self-invention, long before Tommy turned himself into one onscreen. Tommy’s idea of an acting-class display is to roar “Stella!” repeatedly while smashing a chair onto the stage, writhing on the floor, climbing up a wall grid and fearlessly jumping down. His self-invented method is a theatre of attention: he gets Greg to run lines with him in a crowded diner, and turns the exercise into a loud emotional ventilation for the dubious benefit of bewildered customers. He gargles a version of “To be or not to be” for Judd Apatow (who plays himself) in a fancy restaurant and gets thrown out by security. (The scene is a reminder that Apatow should play the lead in one of his own movies.)

So, by the time that Tommy—at Greg’s suggestion—gets down to the business of making a movie, he’s already an object of mockery for oblivious and excessive self-presentation on the stage of life. Tommy dresses in all black, wearing an oversized jacket, baggy pants filled with trinkets, and a huge, jingling ring of dozens of keys. He dyes his metal-band shoulder-length hair raven-black. He gargles crude and inappropriate judgments and insults in an indiscriminate variety of social and professional situations. Tommy is a walking showman who turns his life into an unwanted show, delivered with a sort of grotesque charisma but no technique, nothing but the raging impulse of the moment, all organized around his unbending and universal theme: he is a star, the central attraction of wherever he is, the hero of his own place, and the failure of the world to acknowledge this is a cosmic injustice. If he hadn’t made his own movie, he could have been a reality-TV star, and that’s what Franco makes of him in “The Disaster Artist,” in depicting the foolhardy Tommy’s cinematic apprenticeship. (Wait around for the line “You’re fired.”)

The core of “The Disaster Artist” is the on-set and behind-the-scenes antics involved in the making of “The Room,” and that’s where Franco’s movie both comes alive and falls apart. The movie-within-a-movie is produced, written, and directed by, and also stars, the bravado-bullish Tommy; the subject of “The Disaster Artist” is the marriage of ignorance, ego, and wealth, which translates into power—and its misuse, even its abuse. The nature of that power is revealed when Tommy and Greg visit a movie-equipment house: Tommy, offered an industry-standard camera-rental package, decides to buy his movie camera instead—and to buy both a 35-mm. film camera and a high-definition video camera, just for the hell of it. The purveyors, realizing they have a mark, offer to rent their studio to Tommy for the making of the film, and their own professional crew comes with it. In effect, with one big check, Tommy gets the roaring, high-speed power of a Hollywood-studio production—and he puts it into the service of a melodramatic script that’s unintentionally underdeveloped and comically disjointed.

That’s why “The Room” itself is such an irresistible experience. Unlike many low-budget films, it has a vaguely professional veneer of makeup, costuming, and lighting—even if somewhere at the level of soap operas. It has a cast of professional actors who display a baseline of craft, energy, and involvement, and who surround the real-life Wiseau, who comes off in the film as a raging energumen of inchoate need. Where “The Disaster Artist” offers Franco the chance to do a vigorous, gleefully comedic impersonation of Wiseau, “The Room,” with its blend of surface slickness and artistic clumsiness, is, for better or worse (actually, for worse), a vision of the world. It’s the embodiment of a world view that only an obliviously incoherent person would willingly display, even flaunt.

“The Room” is the story of a moderately successful banker named Johnny (Wiseau), who lives with a young woman named Lisa (played by Juliette Danielle) in a San Francisco apartment. (At different times, they’re said to have been together for either five or seven years; the real-life Danielle was twenty-three at the time of the filming.) Lisa doesn’t work; she depends on Johnny, who lavishes presents and attention on her. Lisa and Johnny are engaged, and they’re supposed to marry soon, but Lisa doesn’t love Johnny. Rather, she loves his best friend, Mark (Sestero), a young man (seemingly in his twenties) who lives in their apartment building. Lisa coaxes Mark into an affair, and she grows increasingly surly around Johnny, and prepares to break up with him. Meanwhile, Johnny has become the unofficial guardian to Denny (Philip Haldiman), a teen-ager for whom he rents an apartment in the building while he’s in school, and who is in love with Lisa, too. There are two other young-adult neighbors, Mike and Michelle, who inexplicably use the apartment during the day for their trysts. And there’s Lisa’s mother, Claudette (Carolyn Minnott), whose life is a mess—romantically, financially, medically—and who urges Lisa to forget her romantic dreams and marry Johnny, who will be able to provide for them both.

Not to put too fine a point on it, “The Room” verges on soft-core pornography. Johnny is a sort of endlessly giving fount of prosperity, ease, and good cheer, and all he wants in return is total devotion, reverent gratitude, and gaudy praise—and, from Lisa, sex. The movie is filled with bedroom scenes that put Lisa on display in a way that signifies his virtual, purchased possessiveness of both the fictional character and the real-life person whose performance he pays for. (In “The Disaster Artist,” there is a sequence depicting Tommy’s overbearing approach to a love scene—the problem with his approach being his humiliation of the fictionalized version of Danielle, played by Ari Graynor, over a pimple on her shoulder, and over his own clumsily realized desire to show his ass onscreen.) “The Room” is a bitter tangle of egocentric desire—of a desire for the ego and other parts to be stroked, and of the display of money and power as the way to have the inner and outer selves gratified. Johnny is the opposite of a philanderer—he’s a possessor, who concentrates the exertion of his power on one woman, who will be present at his call to satisfy him.

The money shot of “The Disaster Artist” is a sequence in which Tommy needs more than sixty takes to get a single shot right—a take in which Johnny, outraged by Lisa’s false, repeated claims that he hit her, bursts through the door to the roof of his apartment building and says, “I did not hit her, it’s not true, it’s bullshit, I did not hit her, I did not; oh, hi, Mark.” The word that dominates “The Room” is “betray”; that word, and variants on it, crop up repeatedly, from beginning to end. Johnny provides for Lisa, he provides for his friends, he’s both a source of support and a rock of virtue, yet he is surrounded by Judases—and Johnny’s ludicrous death scene, in which (in a twist unnoticed in “The Disaster Artist”) he is splayed out on the floor as if crucified, suggests Wiseau’s own view of his protagonist’s, and his own, unimpeachably pure and innocent largesse. If “The Room” displays a cavalier misogyny, it’s not far from an equally casual misanthropy—Wiseau’s vision of a world of betrayers who don’t appreciate the gift bestowed on them in the person of Johnny.