Overview
Genius is a 2016 biographical drama film directed by Michael Grandage and written by John Logan, based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg. The film stars Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Dominic West, and Guy Pearce. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival.
Plot
In 1929, in New York City, Maxwell Perkins is a successful editor at Scribner's and discoverer of great authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. He lives in a "cottage"—actually, a mansion—just outside the city with his wife and five daughters.
One day, in his office, he reads the drafts of O Lost, a novel by Thomas Wolfe. Struck by the content, Perkins decides to publish it and begins to collaborate with the author. It is eventually published as Look Homeward, Angel and proves to be a commercial success: 15 thousand copies sold in a month.
Perkins and Wolfe become best friends, while Wolfe's relationship with Aline Bernstein, a married woman 20 years his senior, is severely tested after the novel's publication. Max manages to publish Wolfe's successful second novel, Of Time and the River, after several years of exhausting revision.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).