Starring Jude Law. Rated PG

British theatre director Michael Grandage makes his film debut using a surprisingly flimsy script from veteran screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator and, I wish I could say, Gator).

It’s an adaptation of A. Scott Berg’s comprehensive study of Maxwell Perkins, the red-pencil man who helped shape the most memorable books of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. You can see how Berg’s witty title, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, got whittled down to the meaningless Genius. Sadly, that reductive process applies to the movie as a whole.

Tracking across the decade after the 1929 stock-market crash, the tale was filmed entirely in England, making a convincingly sepia-toned Manhattan and environs. The cast, which refuses to age, is also mostly British as well, doing its best Americana. Colin Firth is suitably withdrawn as the puritanical Perkins, who never takes his hat off until the final scene, an epilogue to his troubled relationship with Thomas Wolfe, one of the most quoted 20th-century writers no longer widely read. (You Can’t Go Home Again was published posthumously.)

In real life, Wolfe looked more like Peter Lorre than like Jude Law, here playing to the cheap seats with a grandiose Carolina accent. The incredibly prolix Wolfe was kept afloat in this period by Aline Bernstein, a wealthy and married set designer (and eventual cofounder of the Met’s Museum of Costume Art). Almost two decades his senior, she was a Gertrude Stein type, so naturally she’s played by Nicole Kidman. Laura Linney is Perkins’s long-suffering wife, thwarted in her own theatrical ambitions. Dominic West and Guy Pearce show up as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, respectively.

The cast tries hard—too hard, in Law’s case—but Logan’s dialogue is relentlessly explicit where it should be subtle, hammering home the father-son relationship between writer and editor, while virtually ignoring issues of race, class, and gender raised as mere surface decoration. Is it ironic or merely inevitable that a film about the challenges of editing great writers should emerge still needing more passes in the screenplay department?