Gabriel Byrne’s known strength at underplaying works well for this biopic of literary genius Samuel Beckett. Just wish the screenplay had shown us more beneath the surface of this complicated man.

The Irishman was a Paris expat, a World War II resistance member and a philandering husband, but the film starts with him winning the Nobel prize in 1969, in his approaching twilight, Turning the sequence into a fantasy sequence, Beckett accept the prize, then climbs to the rafters of the theater and out of a door, where he meets…himself.

The device is not as disconcerting as it sounds; it gives glimpses into different phases of his life, pretty much in chronological order. But what we end of learning is much more about his mother, his mentor and his wife, than we do about Beckett himself.

His intermittent conversations with his fantasy self do reveal that he feels unworthy and sorry for his many transgressions, but not his motive for swimming against a current that clearly favored him for most of his adult life.

Oh, well-that’s what Wikipedia is for, and it’s the first thing I read after watching a film that is filmed in handsome black and white and, later, in artful color. It looks amazing,

So that’s a mixed bag from me, but I was glad to enter that world for an hour and a half.