SOURCE: Romney, Jonathan. “Out of this World.” New Statesman 129, no. 4485 (8 May 2000): 41-2.

In the following review, Romney applauds Forman's casting choices in Man on the Moon, but finds that the film offers no further insight into Andy Kaufman's life.

To American audiences in the 1970s and 1980s, the comedian Andy Kaufman was a legendary figure whose confrontational routines turned show-business conventions upside down. In Britain, where he was known mainly as the ingratiatingly kooky Latka in the TV sitcom Taxi, Milos Forman's biopic Man on the Moon won't mean quite so much. There's an uncomfortable sense of “you had to be there”: we must take it on trust that Kaufman was a media revolutionary, a pop situationist and a performance artist who used prime-time TV as his medium.

Nevertheless, Kaufman's career remains startling, however accustomed we are today to the wind-up strategies of a Chris Morris. Despite his...