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. 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. They began promoting it to their friends as a cinematic Möbius strip, simultaneously riveting and repellent. 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. It is the “Citizen Kane” of awful, with the writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau as its bizarro Orson Welles. The costumes, sets, lighting? Yes, yes, yes.

What makes “The Room” so very wonderfully, hilariously horrendous? Everything - Every. 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. Some call it “the best bad movie ever made.” But “bad” does not do it justice. If you have not already done so, please see “The Room.” Certain films elicit so much joy they cannot be recommended highly enough.

Tom bissell the room