Ralph Fiennes, who directed the movie, doesn’t tell you, and neither does the face of Oleg Ivenko, the ballet dancer playing (and dancing) Rudy. The character is transfixed by the painting, and as his eyes — and the camera — sweep over the images something meaningfully seems ready to emerge. It doesn’t, creating an unmet expectation that becomes familiar in “The White Crow,” a fictional take on the early life of Nureyev that hits its biographical marks dutifully. As handsome and self-serious as its subject, the movie focuses on his young adulthood, glances back at his early struggles and gestures at his later fame. Every so often during the dance sequences, it also shows you beauty.
These moments are a balm, the very thing that you impatiently wait for while Rudy pouts and practices and repeatedly demonstrates that the young Nureyev — or the film’s conception of him — was more of a vital and engaging presence onstage than off. It makes sense that any great dancer, perhaps especially one of the most renowned of the 20th century, would fascinate when he’s leaping and nearly levitating across a stage. The problem is that while there are dance performances scattered throughout “The White Crow,” as well as interludes with a sweaty Rudy practicing and striving, the offstage scenes tend to feel like filler, the bits stuck between the barre and the theater.
Written by David Hare, the movie opens around 1961, after Rudy has defected to the West. It’s a promising start because of Fiennes’ presence as Alexander Pushkin, Rudy’s teacher and mentor in Leningrad. Pushkin, his face gray and hairline in severe retreat, looks defeated, almost deflated, as if every atom in his body has surrendered. He and a government type are discussing Rudy (the kid’s gotta dance!), a scene that activates the story by turning back the clock. From that point on, the timeline jumps around, perhaps in imitation of its high-flying subject, landing in different moments in Rudy’s life.
A lot of what follows is drowsily watchable. Soon after Pushkin’s entrance, Rudy makes several of his own: on a Soviet train, where he’s born in 1938; as an adult on a plane; as a boy in a colorless childhood filled with snow and Ashcan browns; and as a teenage student. Though Fiennes keeps changing the aspect ratio, the movie settles down once Rudy lands in Paris smiling under a beret. At the height of the Cold War, the Kirov Ballet has gone west to perform at the Paris Opera House (Palais Garnier). Rudy embraces Paris, visits the sights, dazzles audiences and hangs out with a dreary crowd. In time, he defects. (The cast includes the exasperatingly limp Adèle Exarchopoulos as an heiress.)
Nureyev certainly seems an ideal candidate for big-screen memorializing: He was sternly beautiful, wildly talented, feverishly acclaimed. But if you didn’t know why he was considered a transcendent dancer or a transformational figure, you still won’t know after the final credits roll. Rudy’s dances are well-shot — Fiennes emphasizes the entire body in motion so the viewer can trace its line — but they’re pretty and bloodless instead of thrilling, which doesn’t encourage off-screen oohing and ahhing. Like most movies about great art, “The White Crow” only points at the sublime without ever expressing it.
One flaw that Fiennes never transcends is Ivenko, a dancer with a Russian company who slides off the screen when not onstage. The busy, mosaic structure doesn’t help, while the emphasis on Nureyev’s origin story seems a mistake, particularly because his name no longer means what it once did. In a 1962 review, the year after Nureyev defected, British critic Richard Buckle announced the arrival of the “pop dancer,” writing, “What the telly did for art, what Billy Graham did for religion, Nureyev has done for ballet.” Rudy the pop dancer is missing, as is the global star who dabbled as a matinee idol (“Valentino”), was a casualty of the AIDS crisis and still inspires veneration, however artfully muddled.
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‘The White Crow’ is rated R for some casual male nudity and some language. In Russian, English and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.