Watch the hilarious trailer for James Franco’s The Disaster Artist

James Franco's new film The Disaster Artist goes behind the scenes of 2003 oddity The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s endearingly awful melodrama that has since become a cult favourite. Franco plays Wiseau in the film, and the hilarious first trailer suggests he has got the Polish-American actor’s strange voice and mannerisms down to a tee.

The Disaster Artist is based on the book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. Written by Wiseau’s friend and Room co-star Greg Sestero, it chronicles how the uniquely untalented Wiseau ended up making a catastrophically bad film that then became successful. Franco’s younger brother, Dave, plays Sestero; Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, Zac Efron, Josh Hutcherson and Jacki Weaver also turn up in the film.

The Room, for those who have not yet had the pleasure, is a movie of laughable dialogue, excruciating sex scenes and some of the worst acting in the history of cinema. There are glimpses of all this in this first trailer. We see Tommy’s attempts at performing Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare, and Franco doing some perfect line readings from the most iconically stupid scenes in The Room. We also see Tommy wandering through the set naked because he “needs to show my ass to sell this movie”.

The Disaster Artist made its premiere at Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews. Speaking at the festival to Vanity Fair, Franco explains what makes The Room such a special film: “The Room is not the worst movie. It is the best worst movie. I think that is an important distinction. There are thousands upon thousands of movies that people never watch, and people are still watching this movie. I think the secret sauce of The Room is that Tommy put his heart and soul into it, and whether they recognize it or not, people feel that.”

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The Disaster Artist is released in the US 24 Dec by A24; the UK release date is to be confirmed. Take a look at the trailer in the player above