The Theory Of Everything *** 1/2

Dir: James Marsh

Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, David Thewlis, Charlie Cox, Maxine Peake

Come Oscar time and The Theory Of Everything is likely to be a front-runner in a number of categories. It’s the kind of movie that the Academy members like. A true-life tale of a fundamentally decent man (or woman) overcoming great odds (preferably a physically disabling ailment or accident) to go on and achieve some great things. And, in depicting the life story of Stephen Hawking, the world-famous theoretical physicist whose seminal best-seller A Brief History Of Time sits on many a family bookshelf (probably unread), the filmmakers have as inspiring a tale as they could want.

For Stephen Hawking boasts not only one of the most brilliant minds on the planet but is also a prisoner of his body - a body ravaged by the effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or "motor neuron disease" as the doctors in the movie call it) which have left him bound to a wheelchair and able to communicate with the world only through a computerised voice for the past three decades or so.

This is how the world knows him and, perhaps, how it has always known him.

The Theory Of Everything, based on Hawking’s first wife’s memoir, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen takes us back to a time before ALS took over the physicist’s life, depicting the start of his romance with fellow Cambridge University co-ed, Jane Hawking nee Wilde, as well as the beginnings of his scientific enquiries into the laws of nature that govern the universe.

While the movie does an excellent job of the loving but difficult relationship between the two, increasingly strained by the effects of Hawking’s disease, it is still a somewhat sanitised version (Jane Wilde’s first memoir, Music To Move The Stars presents a much bleaker picture of the marriage and a less flattering portrait of Stephen Hawking the man) and the movie is lighter still on the science.

Still, Eddie Redmayne is superb as Stephen in both his pre-and-post wheelchair bounds avatars (and the stages in between) and Felicity Jones matches him every step of the way in the less obviously showy role of Jane. It is the two of them – separately and together - that turn this somewhat standard bio-pic into something quite absorbing.

Cut to chase: Excellent performances elevate an interesting biopic