When we first see Nikola Tesla, he is on roller skates, making his way with dignified caution across a marble floor at some kind of Gilded Age gathering. It’s 1893. Later — though some years earlier in the looped chronology of Michael Almereyda’s new film — Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison, his rival and erstwhile employer, attack each other with ice cream cones. At another point, our narrator, Anne Morgan (daughter of the mighty financier J. Pierpont Morgan), flips open a laptop to compare the results of a Google search for Tesla and Edison. These whimsical moments of speculation and anachronism remind us that “Tesla,” which chronicles a crucial period in the inventor’s life, is anything but a conventional biopic.
Thank goodness for that. My own internet investigations yielded the fascinating (to me, at least) datum that Telsa and I share a birthday, and also an extensive Wikipedia page devoted to “Nikola Tesla in Popular Culture.” While hardly obscure in his lifetime, Tesla, who was born in what is now Croatia in 1856 and died in a New York hotel in 1943, has in recent decades become a fixture in the cool-nerd pantheon. He bequeathed his name to an electric car. David Bowie played him in a Christopher Nolan movie.
The mystique arises from the sense that Tesla anticipated, at least in theory, much of the technology we now marvel at and complain about, including global wireless communication. But as Anne Morgan notes, very few images of him will pop up when you Google, and he retains a stubborn aura of mystery.
Almereyda, a notably cerebral filmmaker who thinks in arresting, elusive images, doesn’t set out to solve the riddle so much as to find new ways of articulating it. Ethan Hawke, with somber countenance and a heavy mustache, plays Tesla as a restless soul burdened by genius and haunted by melancholy. A less imaginative film might have tried to trace that sorrow to a source in childhood, or to establish a link between Tesla’s saturnine temperament and his unsettled career. But the character, in Hawke’s quietly magnetic performance, is neither a heroic visionary nor a tragic hero. He’s a mood.
The film follows his brooding progress from Edison’s workshop to the 1893 World’s Fair, and then onward to Colorado and Long Island, where Tesla pursues increasingly grand and esoteric ideas. Along the way, he attracts and alienates allies, investors and potential lovers. A flicker of romantic interest passes between him and Anne (Eve Hewson), but it isn’t strong enough to melt Tesla’s commitment to solitude and chastity. He also draws the radiant attention of the actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who, like him, appears as a prophetic figure in a rapidly modernizing world — an avatar of the nascent celebrity culture that will expand alongside the new technologies.
Tesla lives mainly inside his own head, and “Tesla” offers an intriguing and sometimes puzzling excursion into the brain of its maker. It’s less concerned with the drama of its subject’s life or his possible interactions with other historical personages than with Almereyda’s thoughts — about fame, physics, capitalism and the myriad other issues that flutter through the movie like moths, with Tesla as the glowing enigma that attracts them. The ideas don’t arrive as topics of conversation, but rather as motifs, ballast for the arresting, expressively shadowed compositions that the director and his cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, have fashioned, often using paintings and still photographs as backdrops.
The elliptical story is given a crucial spark of conflict — and wit — by the frenemyship between Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and Tesla. The contest between their approaches to electrification was the subject of another recent movie, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s “The Current War,” which emphasized the business competition between Edison and George Westinghouse. (Those battling entrepreneurs were played by Benedict Cumberbatch and James Shannon, with Nicholas Hoult in a secondary role as the egghead Tesla). Here, notwithstanding Jim Gaffigan’s impressively bewhiskered turn as Westinghouse, the strongest energy flows between Hawke and MacLachlan.
For Almereyda fans, their pairing is a welcome reunion. In the director’s wonderful “Hamlet” (2000), Hawke played the gloomy title character, while MacLachlan was a disarmingly human Claudius, his stepfather and nemesis. Here, the rhetoric is not as grand, the stakes are less sharply defined and the actors wear their borrowed personalities lightly. You might not learn everything there is to know about Tesla — that’s what the internet is for — but you will nonetheless feel illuminated by his presence.
Tesla
Rated PG-13. A few shocks. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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