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This is one of Genius's great flaws: The film, filled with literary heavyweights, is light on insight. So many montages, so many shots of a red pencil marking up typewritten pages, but so little depth when it comes to who these people were and what motivated them. And in the end, you leave thinking: If only Max Perkins had had a stab at this.

If you have any feel for writing, and I suppose if you particularly have any feel for Wolfe's writing, you'll find the exchanges between editor and author exhilarating. Logan's script, based on A. Scott Berg's biography of Perkins, is invested in the craft of words like few other movies nowadays, even those ostensibly about writers. And if you have no particular concern for writing, the emotional drama is not insignificant.

It's jarring that Genius comes off like a tony British play. Staged by Michael Grandage, late of London's Donmar Warehouse and new to film, this is a stately framing of the yin-yang symbiosis between a volatile, grandiose novelist and the quietly authoritative editor who brought out the best in him.

It's an unfortunate sign that Grandage, one of the foremost theater directors working today, has not exactly shaken off his stage roots with this first effort behind the camera. While there are grace notes in Firth's diffident, dignified performance, supplying a welcome contrast to Law's histrionics, the two men's complex internal dynamic — Perkins yearning for the son he never had, Wolfe desperate for fatherly approval — feels more constructed, more written, than fully inhabited.

What counts against it is the fact that it's a superficial, genteel bore of an experience—and that the movie's meagreness arises precisely from the thinning-out and bowdlerization of its source material.

The film makes a convincing argument for viewing Wolfe's work as a product of the excess and exuberance of the 1920s, his celebration of the gargantuan life force of the individual perfectly captured by the film in a scene where Wolfe has several men deliver the 5,000-page manuscript of his latest novel to Perkins's office in a seemingly endless series of boxes and crates.

If you can get past the spectacle of British and Australian actors portraying some of the most important figures of 20th-century American literature, Genius is a good example of a prestige pic that is not only literate but surprisingly vibrant.

Mediocrities like Genius, Michael Grandage's somewhat naff take on Thomas Wolff's editor Maxwell Perkins, or Rafi Pitt's Soy Nero, a well-meaning but artistically misguided attempt at mashing up two hot topics (immigration and the Middle East wars), could just as well have been unloaded in Panorama, which these days deals almost exclusively in brainless do-gooder-tainment.

If you're not an insufferable self-obsessed asshole, you just can't be a genius—sorry. That seems to be the definition of genius echoed in, well, Genius, a melodramatic biopic of Thomas Wolfe, whose greatness surely resided in his inability to feel any empathy whatsoever for those with whom he was closest, especially his long-term editor, the esteemed Maxwell Perkins (who also edited Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Law hyperventilated poetically, Firth internalised more tautly than ever, and Nicole Kidman offered some knowingly imperious grace notes – all in 1930s visual tones not so much sepia as old tobacco.

While Salles [with On the Road] used all the tools in the director's kit to try explore Kerouac's riffing, freewheeling prose, Grandage leans heavily on Thomas Wolfe's words. They are delivered in gushing torrents by Law, in an accent which veers between North Carolina and North London. It's the kind of performance that might be electrifying on stage but on screen, it feels as though he is constantly bouncing off the edges of the frame.

The film's earnestness has its own blunt appeal, especially when put in service of a glossy, starry film sincerely dedicated to resurrecting the memory of a largely forgotten man, and when gathered around an eccentrically contrasting pair of performances. For those reasons, "Genius" nudges its nose, or maybe just the brim of its fedora, ahead of a lot of prestige biopics.