Tolkien (12A)***

With: Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Colm Meaney, Derek Jacobi

Runtime: 112 minutes

WITH two films out at the same time, this is shaping up to be the unofficial Lily Collins Cinema Week.

While Extremely Wicked at least tries to strain against convention, Dome Karukoski’s biopic of the writer of The Lord of the Rings is a thoroughly old fashioned affair which presents a portrait of the artist in formation.

Tolkien is played by Nicholas Hoult with Collins as Edith Bratt, the woman who would become his wife. Opening at the Somme with Tolkien desperate to find out the fate of one of his friends, the story of his early years is told in flashback, all the way from the loss of his parents when he was a boy to the moment he met Edith and beyond.

Throughout, the screenplay by David Gleeson (The Front Line) and Stephen Beresford (Pride), picks out what they see are the primary influences in his life, which would later find expression in his work. So we note, for example, that he and his band of school friends call themselves the fellowship; that the young soldier who helps him on his quest to find his friend is named Sam; and the fevered visions he has on the battlefield include fire breathing dragons. It is hardly subtle. Are there ever such straightforward connections between an artist and his art?

Hoult and Collins make a convincing couple on screen, at ease with each other despite the occasionally starchy and stagey scenes conjured up by Karukoski.

The battle scenes at the Somme are handled impressively. Ditto the years at Oxbridge as the fellowship go through their studies (and Derek Jacobi turns up as a professor).

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the picture is that the author’s family has been quick to make clear its disapproval, which might suggest there is something unflattering about the portrait. There is not. The film’s greatest failing, at least from a cinemagoer’s point of view, is its dullness.