How do you make a great movie about the worst moviemaker of all time? It's a difficult hat trick at best, but darned if Tim Burton hasn't pulled it off. Of course, looking at the director's filmography — "Peewee's Big Adventure," "Edward Scissorhands," "Bettlejuice," the two "Batman" movies — who else could?

The real question, however, is whether mainstream audiences will embrace this picture, or whether it's too inside for anything but a cult following. Only time will tell.

Filmed in atmospheric black and white, "Ed Wood" is the story of an enthusiastic, ever-optimistic young man in Hollywood during the 1950s who dreams of being an auteur. But anyone who is familiar with Wood knows that his writing-directing efforts were so bad they have gone down in cinematic history as being unintentionally hysterical, such as his most notorious picture, "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

In "Ed Wood," the aspiring filmmaker considers himself an undiscovered Orson Welles, bemoaning the fact that Welles made "Citizen Kane" at 26 while he has hit 30 and achieved nothing of note.

We first meet Wood as he is bombing with a no-budget, no-audience stage play. It's opening night, and after the show, he looks through the local paper for a review. The critic has vilified the play, of course, but Wood manages to turn it around as he reads a quote to his cast: "The soldiers' costumes are very realistic," he notes, adding, "See? That's positive!"

To break into movies, Wood hits up a grade-Z exploitation producer who wants a "skin flick." What he gets instead is a poignant, heartfelt and truly awful movie called "Glen or Glenda," which Wood writes, directs and in which he stars as, essentially, himself — a cross-dressing man with a fetish for angora sweaters. It's not exactly what the producer expected.

Despite his employers' disdain for his work, Wood, played charmingly as a cockeyed optimist by Johnny Depp, is determined to continue making films — and the rest of "Ed Wood" chronicles his efforts in Hollywood.

Largely a sketchy portrait, the movie gets some heft from a secondary character, Bela Lugosi, thanks to a dead-on (and Oscar-worthy) portrayal by Martin Landau. Wood befriends Lugosi in his declining years, puts him in a couple of his movies and tries to help him overcome his drug addiction.