Tesla is a fittingly unconventional biopic of a most unconventional man

Ethan Hawke stars in Tesla, an inventive new biopic from Director Michael Almereyda.

The world is arguably overdue for a biographical film about the eccentric Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, and Director Michael Almereyda (Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story) has obliged with his new film, Tesla, starring Ethan Hawke. But this is not your traditional biopic. We know we're in for a very different, more dream-like, interior kind of movie in the very first scene. A woman's voice informs us that Tesla became fascinated by electricity as a young boy upon learning that the sparks he created while stroking his pet cat were the same phenomenon as the lightning in the sky. "Is nature a gigantic cat?" he wondered. "And if so, who strokes its back?"

Almereyda became intrigued by Tesla as a teenager when he became friends with comic book artist Alex Toth, who was a Tesla enthusiast. It became a lifelong obsession. The Serbian inventor was the subject of Almereyda's very first screenplay, which the writer/director would ultimately rework, decades later, into the script for Tesla. The director has probably read just about everything about Tesla ever written.

Along with Margaret Cheney's seminal 1981 biography, Tesla: Man Out of Time, Almereyda was particularly influenced by Christopher Cooper's 2015 book, The Truth About Tesla: The Myth of the Lone Genius (which dispels many of the most popular myths and Internet rumors surrounding the inventor), as well as Derek Jarman films and episodes of Drunk History. Although Almereyda's film is serious in tone, the influence of the latter is felt in its deliberate nonlinearity and clever use of intentional anachronisms.

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