No work of ‘Genius,’ this literary drama is strictly by-the-book

Starring Colin Firth, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. Directed by Michael Grandage.

Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and suggestive content. Check listings. 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Bottom line: Doesn't crackle with electricity, but it's not a complete failure

Michael Grandage’s “Genius” dramatizes a few chapters from the life and career of Maxwell Perkins, the editor who discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others, and helped shape their raw manuscripts into leather-bound milestones of American literature. Not that Perkins — played by Colin Firth as a quiet, self-effacing figure with a sharp eye for error and exaggeration — would have allowed such an assessment to stand uncorrected. “My only job is to put good books in the hands of readers,” he reassures a nervous new talent. “The book belongs to you.”

Perkins’ refusal of the spotlight and his deep respect for the authors he nurtured may explain why Grandage’s film, though often as stiff and musty as a poorly preserved first edition, manages to elicit a measure of goodwill. There may be something inherently, perversely un-cinematic about the sight of Firth hunched over a desk with a red pen in hand, but you needn’t be a grateful author (or a journalist on deadline) to find something heroic in the attempt. If “Genius” is a failure — and by the generally unilluminating standards of most mainstream movies about the creative process, I’m not entirely sure it is — it succeeds in being a noble, even charming one.

Every screen adaptation of a book represents an edit of its source material. In this case, screenwriter John Logan (whose credits include “Hugo” and the two most recent James Bond movies) has sifted through A. Scott Berg’s superbly detailed 1978 biography, “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,” in search of the most accessible and dramatic elements at hand. Like so many simplified Hollywood treatments of an artist’s inner life, “Genius” describes a tricky intellectual process in easy emotional terms, translating a complex personal and professional bond into a sweetly sentimental literary bromance.

Wolfe is by all accounts the most difficult and irrepressible talent in Perkins’ stable — and also the most outlandishly theatrical, to judge by Jude Law’s puckish performance in the role. Bursting into the Manhattan offices of Charles Scribner’s Sons on a rainy day in 1929, the still-unpublished author bemoans the inevitable rejection of his enormous manuscript, unaware that Perkins, against the better judgment of many, has already decided to accept it.

For its part, “Genius,” despite an appreciably swift 104-minute running time, doesn’t exactly crackle with electricity. This is due to no lack of effort from Law, delivering his foaming-at-the-mouth pronouncements and wild gesticulations from beneath a bedraggled mop of hair.

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.