Orphaned teenager Ronald is an outcast at his new school, probably because he's too smart for his own good. One of his first lessons sees a bully steal his textbook before he's called on to read Chaucer in Old English; as the other students prepare to watch him be shamed by the professor, he recites the passage beautifully from memory. This earns him no friends. Not yet.
Taking center stage in Tolkien, a biopic of the young J.R.R. Tolkien in adventures of life and love, is Nicholas Hoult as the esteemed writer. His solid performance is matched by his comrades, notably Lily Collins as his love Edith Bratt and Anthony Boyle as his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith. Young Tolkien's hard work and brilliant mind eventually earn him the respect -- and, yes, friendship -- of three other young men including Geoffrey, and together the four create a club of intellectual artists. Meanwhile Tolkien maneuvers ever closer to Edith, whose life is far more restricted than his own and who seems to fall in love with the freedoms Tolkien's imagination offers her.
We see hints, occasionally, of Tolkien's legendarium in his early life, but the film largely glosses over the significant events and works that inspired his greatest creation (or, if you know better, his "sub-creation"). The closest we get to witnessing his genius blossom is in the heat of World War I, as he fights through the Battle of the Somme. Clouds of gas belch forth visions of wraiths and ghosts, one explosion may be a balrog's attack and another spews from a dragon's maw. Tolkien plunges through pools of mud and blood choking with bodies in what we might call dead marshes while green poisonous gas oozes through the trenches. It's really the only sequence in the film worth watching.
The film hosts, now I think on it, two other scenes that are interesting for other reasons. One is between Tolkien and his friend Geoffrey, strongly indicated in the film to be queer and filled with unrequited love for his comrade. The two are together the morning after Tolkien learned his childhood love Edith is engaged to another man and drank himself into a stupor; Geoffrey delivers a stunning speech about unrequited love being the most pure, beautiful, and terrible thing a man can know: a perfect subject for poetry. The other interesting scene comes immediately after, when Tolkien meets and begins to learn from Professor Joseph Wright (played by Derek Jacobi).
These scenes are the only moments in the film of gorgeous screenwriting. Everything else falls woefully short of the grandeur and potential insight into Tolkien's life. His religious ideas are almost totally erased, as are his childhood and years after WWI. The actual inspirations and influences on his work are skated over, suggested, or completely ignored. Instead, we get a lovely romance about how a man maneuvers between coming of age, love, and burgeoning artistic genius. Too bad they had to tack on the real-life names and so blatantly water down everything interesting about the real man.
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