Tesla biopic, starring Ethan Hawke: eccentric portrayal

The mystique surrounding the Serbian American inventor Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) is rather baffling. In life, far from being underrated or forgotten, Tesla was a celebrity. He rose from humble Balkan beginnings in a village in what is now Croatia to cavort with New York high society. The most successful of his inventions — the alternating-current (AC) induction motor and generator — helped US entrepreneur George Westinghouse and his AC power-transmission system to win the electricity war against inventor Thomas Edison and his direct-current version.

In death, Tesla’s cult status has only grown. The SI unit of magnetic-field strength is named after him. Two electric-car companies bear his first and last name. The Tesla flame has been kept alight by biographies, documentaries, movies (one with actor and filmmaker Orson Welles, another with musician David Bowie) and even an opera. Fans, it seems, are drawn as much by his inventiveness as by his wilder ideas — such as using Earth and its atmosphere to wirelessly conduct electricity around the globe.

His is a story of an eccentric genius that each age retells in its own image. The latest biopic Tesla, directed by Michael Almereyda, is released this week.

The film exploits jarring gimmicks. In an early scene, Tesla (played by Ethan Hawke) and Edison (Kyle MacLachlan), splatter ice cream on each other’s suits during a heated argument. The frame freezes, and Tesla’s friend Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of fabled financier J. P. Morgan, tells us that this fight never happened. Becoming the on-screen narrator, Morgan breaks the fourth wall to say that googling ‘Nikola Tesla’ gets 34 million search results — evidence, she assures us, that Tesla is famous, although not quite as famous as his arch-enemy Edison, who has 64 million results. “Twice as many as Tesla,” she adds, glancing at the camera.

Thumping dance music underscores a party thrown by French actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan). Edison consults a smartphone while the narrator speculates on what the rivals could have achieved together. Painted backdrops depict scenes such as the Colorado setting of Tesla’s experiments with artificial lightning and wireless transmission. The cherry on top of this misbegotten cake is Hawke’s rendition, in faux-Slavic accent, of the song ‘Everybody Wants To Rule the World’ by the 1980s band Tears for Fears.

Perhaps Almereyda’s point is that Tesla was the Steve Jobs of his time — a testy, workaholic visionary and showman who disrupted his age with beautiful ideas that caught Wall Street’s eye. But it is an unconvincing comparison: unlike Jobs, Tesla had no innovation factory to realize his wizardry at scale.

The film skirts some more interesting and less-explored aspects of his personal relationships, described in the 2013 biography Tesla by historian Bernard Carlson. For instance, Tesla was capable of pettiness in intellectual-property disputes — including those he had won, as in the case of the induction motor. Some have speculated that Tesla and Edison might both have missed out on a Nobel prize because the committee was turned off by their squabbles. Perhaps an ice-cream fight would have been the least of it.