Starring Tobey Maguire. Rated PG. Now playing

People are still searching for Bobby Fischer, even if few like what they find when they get there. The latest effort ties its subject’s incipient craziness to the paranoia of the Cold War. But if anyone was a pawn in the stalemate between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it wasn’t Bobby Fischer.

Still, the Brooklyn boy was marked by the Big Freeze, having been born to a Russian-Jewish mother (played here by Robin Weigert) and, most likely, a Hungarian physicist she never married. As seen in the weaker early parts of Pawn Sacrifice (which look and sound like recreations from those cheesy true-crime shows), Fischer’s family was hounded by the FBI. By the time the chess prodigy was old enough to be played by Tobey Maguire (who also produced), he was developing his unified-field conspiracy theory, somehow blaming Communists, the CIA, and international Jewry for the shape of the world.

This didn’t stop him taking government support, in the form of an agent who was really an agent (Michael Stuhlbarg), helping him moving up the international ranks just as Americans and Russians recognized in chess an irresistible metaphor for their nuclear gamesmanship. Fischer had his sights set on Russian champion Boris Spassky, and he wanted to beat Boris bad enough to go anywhere—meaning Reykjavik, for a 1972 face-off that would, in its way, rival Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle for the sporting event of the seventies.

The moment Liev Schreiber arrives as Spassky, in Raybans and a black limousine, the game is over. Speaking only Russian, Schreiber steals the movie (mostly shot in Iceland and Canada), and the prawn-sized Maguire looks doubly furious. The real Fischer was taller than his opponent, and blonde, but director Ed Zwick (Glory)—working from a schematic script by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) and Stephen J. Rivele (Nixon)—sees this chess master as a kind of mousy everyman, cracking under the stress of competing ideologies.

The film gets better as it moves along, but it’s really about a guy who was beaten by life before he even got to the board.