Genius (2016)

Great work rarely happens alone - behind many gifted artists is someone who helps shape the raw material into something lasting. Michael Grandage's "Genius," written by John Logan and based on A. Scott Berg's biography "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius," tells the true story of legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth), who discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and his close, complicated friendship with the brilliant, larger-than-life novelist Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law). In the late 1920s, after publisher after publisher has rejected him, Wolfe arrives at Perkins' office with a mammoth, sprawling manuscript that will become "Look Homeward, Angel." Perkins recognizes his genius and takes him on. As they wrestle Wolfe's massive manuscripts into shape, cutting thousands of pages to produce his first novel and its follow-up, "Of Time and the River," the reserved, buttoned-up editor and the exuberant, egotistical writer become almost like father and son. Their bond strains the people who love them, including Wolfe's lover and patron, Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), who feels abandoned, and Perkins' wife, Louise (Laura Linney), a playwright who watches her husband disappear into his work. Guy Pearce plays a weary, struggling Fitzgerald, and Dominic West appears as Hemingway. Grandage, an acclaimed stage director, makes an elegant film debut.