Maybe, like Courtney Love said as Lynne Margulies, Andy's girlfriend, "There is no REAL (Andy Kaufman)."

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 1999)

I really like Andy Kaufman. I grew up watching him torture the world, and I think more than a little of his brand of humor made its way into psyche and helped me become the person I am today. I saw him on SNL and Fridays (and of course Taxi). I followed the tabloids when he got sick (the web wasn't around yet, so the tabloids were still the least accurate medium of the time) because they were the only ones who seemed to really care. I remember watching a late-night news program one time showing in great detail what the charlatans like the one who treated Andy really did. I followed anything I could on Andy to the point that I even watched wrestling for a while (and believe me, back then, if you didn't live in a trailer park, you didn't admit to watching wrestling.) In high school, his bits were always some of my circles of friends' favorites to recite ad infinitum. But I never felt for a moment that I knew who Andy Kaufman really was, and unfortunately I still don't.
Man on the Moon is a really good movie; there's no denying that. Jim Carrey's performance is dead on. He deserves an Oscar nom here much more so than he did for the overrated Truman Show. But when you put Milos Forman together with writers Alexander & Karaszewski for a film about a comic genius, you expect GREAT. What Man on the Moon does is give almost perfect recreations of Kaufman's most famous bits. What it doesn't do is give any real insight to what made the man this way. If A & K get a writing nom for this one, they should defer it to Andy Kaufman and his longtime writing partner, Bob Zmuda, because those two wrote over half of everything seen in this film. The recreations were fantastic; they couldn't have been better if Kaufman had come back and performed them himself. But when it came time to show what was going on in Andy's head, they were obviously stumped. Maybe the behind the mask stuff didn't test well and was cut out. I don't know. All I know is most episodes of A&E's Biography show more insight in an hour than Man on the Moon did in two. Maybe, like Courtney Love said as Lynne Margulies, Andy's girlfriend, "There is no REAL (Andy Kaufman)."