“All poets are mad,” the 16th century scholar observed. And so they have been, at least in the movies — mad and mercurial and of course, entertaining drunks.
Dylan Thomas is the patron saint of this stereotype, and it’s his boozy, reeling first visit to America, as “the purest lyrical poet in the English speaking world,” that is the subject of “Set Fire to the Stars,” a Welsh co-production celebrating and illuminating the great Welsh poet.
By 1950, Thomas, in his mid-30s, was both celebrated and notorious. He’d come to fame reading his poetry on the BBC during World War II. But it was his bawdy, rude and riotously ripped personal reputation that gave America’s academics pause before they’d agree to sponsor a U.S. tour.
Elijah Wood plays John Brinnin, the New York poet whose idea this tour was. The first scene in “Set Fire to the Stars” is Wood, flippantly trying to put his fellow academics at ease about Thomas. His reputation as a drinker “must be inflated,” surely. “How much trouble can one poet be?”
Quite a bit, if you turn him loose on the tavern capital of North America.
Thomas, played by Welsh actor and Thomas look-alike Celyn Jones (who co-wrote the script), is the life of every party, the barfly’s barfly. He’d rather listen to the music in a waitress’s jargon-jazzed order than recite a poem. But give him enough to drink and he’ll break into song, or obscene limericks.
“A frustrated lady named Alice,” he bellows, “used a dynamite stick for a phallus.” And that’s as printable as that poem gets.
But Brinnin, straining to keep Thomas sober enough to perform and polite enough to rub elbows with college faculties, is in over his head. Even dragging the poet to a cabin in Connecticut doesn’t help, when there are fans/neighbors (Shirley Henderson, Kevin Eldon) willing to flirt and drink into the poet’s good graces.
Wood is well-cast as the closeted, repressed Boswell to the Great Man, ill-used and put-out at the poet’s many indiscretions.
Jones is lively as Thomas the drunk, predictably maudlin and morose as the man behind the partier. He makes his best impressions as the poet, summoning up the voice that turned Thomas into a recording star, reading his work for others.
“I may without fail,” the poem that provides the film’s title goes, “Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.”
“Set Fire to the Stars” is shot in a period-perfect but video-flat black and white, with Welsh locations nicely doubling for New York.
Co-writer/director Andy Goddard delivers lovely grace notes — in a roadhouse where Rosie, the slangy-waitress (Maimie McCoy) presides, and near the end, where those who have met Thomas on his travels perform that titular poem, “Love in the Asylum.”
This film, based on Brinnin’s memoir, “Dylan Thomas in America,” could easily have become a tragi-comic “My Favorite Year” with poetry. But Goddard and Jones never quite turn it loose, never let us forget the haunted man who couldn’t have just one drink/one woman (Kelly Reilly plays Caitlin Thomas, the wife, in a vision). The result is wintry and melancholy, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” in tone. And because of that, it’s a trifle duller than the man himself surely must have been.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with alcohol abuse, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Elijah Wood, Celyn Jones, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Reilly, Steven Mackintosh
Credits: Directed by Andy Goddard, script by Celyn Jones and Andy Goddard. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:37