OPINION | REVIEW: Electric power glide 'Tesla' could use a charge

Most of us have a vague notion of Nikola Tesla as a mad scientist, who resembled Frank Zappa, rivaled Thomas Edison for a while, then went colorfully bonkers and died penniless. We might know that he's a cult hero in some nerdy circles, and the namesake of Elon Musk's electric automobile.

Tesla was brilliant but not wise, a terrible capitalist who gave away billions of dollars in future earnings largely because he'd become bored with the debate between advocates of direct current and alternating current. His AC motor was clearly superior to the DC system advocated by Edison and became the standard through which electrical power is delivered over transmission lines, while the only DC power most of us encounter is delivered through batteries. Think how inconvenient (and expensive) it you ran a houseful of appliances on batteries.

His technology bettered Edison's (chronicled in Michael Mitnick's 2017 film "The Current War," in which Tesla, a supporting player, was played by Nicolas Hoult), but the real beneficiary was George Westinghouse, who was handed billions of dollars when Tesla tore up a contract that would have paid the inventor royalties on the power his motors produced.

Tesla could have merely suspended these royalties for a time, or negotiated for a much higher settlement than the one Westinghouse eventually paid him, but he had bigger dreams to chase -- death rays, conversations with Martians and worldwide transmission of free wireless power.

Writer-director Michael Almereyda ("Marjorie Prime") seeks to tell Tesla's story in an idiosyncratic and sly way that comes perilously close to quirkiness. On the positive side, he's enlisted Ethan Hawke, an earnest and thoroughly professional actor who is willing to risk appearing ridiculous to serve a director (he worked with Almereyda 20 years ago on a not-so-well-received but in some respects brilliant retelling of "Hamlet" set in contemporary New York City) whom he trusts.

Here Hawke commits to a dreamy Tesla who seems a touch on the spectrum, a man who can't quite work out what the humans mean when they smile and joke. Edison (Kyle MacLachan, all gravitas and swarm) had offered a $50,000 bounty to anyone who could make significant improvements to his electrical technology -- Tesla gives him the insight and he says it was all a joke? That Tesla doesn't understand the American sense of humor? Perhaps it is so.

But we all get it (don't we?) it when MacLachan as Edison invites Tesla to sit down and enjoy an American delicacy: pie.

Anyway, Tesla quits Edison and is reduced to digging ditches and trying to find investors, a task he's singularly ill-equipped to do. Luckily for him, Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of J.P. Morgan, has taken an interest in him. But Tesla is too inner-directed to grasp that Anne may be attracted to more than his mind and the ideas he sheds with regularity.

Anne serves as the fourth-wall destroying narrator for this faux-conventional biopic, unflapping her iMac to let us in on the Google results for Tesla, Edison and pragmatic Westinghouse (played here by a boisterous Jim Gaffigan). Here the off-kilter period drama (Morgan and Tesla are introduced, skating with elegant clumsiness around her father's marble-floored Madison Avenue mansion) intersects with a certain kind of cheeky documentary, as here and there the filmmakers defeat budgetary and epidemiological limitations by employing theatrical tactics such as projected backdrop and whimsical re-enactions (an imagined duel between Edison and Tesla is fought with ice cream cones).

We also get a wonderfully bizarre rendition of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" sung by a depressive Tesla in the Serbian accent Edison mistakes for Transylvanian, and a blink-or-you'll-miss-it-moment when Edison flicks the screen of his iPhone while standing at a bar.

Whether you find this casual anachronism amusing or tiresome will determine how you feel about the film. You're likely to be either mildly amused or mildly annoyed, though it is possible to imagine that some of those who've adopted Tesla as their personal culture hero will be the most offended by its portrayal of him as an impractical, loopy human who could never really screw it together.

Almereyda doesn't let us in on his verdict of Tesla, if he indeed arrives at one at all. Hawke insists on the inventor's humanity and basic decency -- he is a prideful man of honor too distracted by the cosmic drama in his head to notice the daughter of the world's richest man has set her cap for him. Or that Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan) would like his attention.

While not a triumph, the understated, underpowered "Tesla" is like "Hamilton" in that while it would be foolish to accept as anything but fanciful, drunken history, if all you know of Tesla, Edison and Westinghouse is what you glean from this film, you're not probably too far off.