The full title of “Dance First” includes the phrase “A Life of Samuel Beckett.” They left out the word “abridged.”

Because while one simply could not do better than have the great Irish actor Gabriel Byrne playing Beckett as a reluctant Nobel laureate, wracked by guilt and having a film-long debate with an alter ego about what to do with “the prize money” from that unwanted honor, it was never going to be easy to fit all that Beckett was, with generous samples of his work, into a 100 minute movie.

The Irish playwright, novelist, poet and short story writer was one the most celebrated and influencial authors of the 20th century. Beckett spent most of his working life in Paris, and composed many of his most famous works first in French, which is how the world first encountered Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and the unlucky Lucky, standing around talking, “Waiting for Godot.”

In the film that British director James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”) and Scottish TV writer Neil Forsyth conjure up, Beckett is basically reduced to that guilt as he considers the women in his life, and men, that he figures he let down over the years.

While that reductivism seems a valid, servicable approach and provides the frame to the black and white flashbacks of Beckett’s brooding past, it proves a bit of a slog as the script serves up few highs and lows, almost no “work in progress” scenes or “Eureka!” moments. It’s as sentimental as a “Maestro,” but lacks the spark, the thrills of more entertaining biopics.

I’d blame some of that on Beckett himself. When the BBC editor Barbara (Maxine Peake of “The Theory of Everything”) who falls for him gushes over “Waiting for Godot,” she calls it a masterpiece and then states the obvious.

“But nothing happens.”

“Nothing happens twice,” the wily absurdist Beckett corrects her.

Aside from the time a Paris pimp stabbed him in the chest, a brief interlude in which the not-yet-famous Irish expat joins the French Resistance during World War II and a few testy exchanges over the autobiographical nature of his work with the women in his life protesting their treatment in the fiction, that goes for the film as well. Not a lot happens. And what does happen is treated too matter-of-factly to be of great dramatic interest.

Beckett hears his name called out in Oslo at the December, 1969 Nobel Prize ceremony, and turns to his (secret) wife and longtime collaborator and “companion” Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) and mutters “What a catastrophe” (in French). He stomps up on stage, snatches the award and then climbs the lighting rig in the wings, leaving the theater. He emerges in what looks like a decomissioned salt mine, the perfect empty space/wasteland for Samuel Beckett to debate himself (Byrne x 2) over what this means.

He and his alter ego decide that the only way to make amends for this “undeserved” glory is to consider what to do with the cash, and rehash all the people the imperious, brilliant Beckett wronged over the course of his life — starting with his demanding, hated mother (Lisa Dwyer Hoff, brittle, bitter and toxic) — and how he might somehow “honor” or “repay” them with the money.

With her and his more-doting dad (Barry O’Connor) raising him in the privilege of private school and kite-flying reveries, May Beckett simply cannot understand or countenance the portrait she sees of herself in his earliest fiction.

“You could only imagine it as you because the whole world is you,” young Beckett (Fionn O’Shea) hisses back, drawing blood.

After graduating from Trinity College in Dublin, Beckett moved to Paris and sought out James Joyce as a mentor. “Game of Thrones” and “Peaky Blinders” alumnus Aiden Gillen plays Joyce as a 1930s burnout, still famous for “Ulyssees,” but no longer “that James Joyce.”

The script gives Gillen an edge to play in his world wearinness, setting the tone for their connection when he dismisses the fanboy’s first approach.

“I’m deep in THOUGHT.”

Beckett eventually befriends Joyce, and we meet the second source of his lifelong guilt. Joyce and his wife (the great Bronagh Gallagher) allow him to stay for dinner, to hang around and rudely pick the great writer’s brain while ignoring the women of the house only so long as Beckett takes their mercurial, impulsive “mad” daughter Lucia (Gráinne Good, terrific) out dancing.

Beckett cannot let that go any further, and Joyce cannot commit his daughter because once they’ve done that, she can’t come back and “Where else can she go?”

Joyce still had “Finnegan’s Wake” in his future, but he pushes Beckett to either write the truth, challenge himself and the literary status quo, or settle for a lifetime of pondering “consideration”great works, rather than actually writing them. “Stay there, it’s safe there.” And when it comes to translating Joyce’s works, he and his wife have their revenge on Beckett when he undertakes that.

Paris is where Beckett met the smart and beautiful Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine), who could see greatness in the young man, if he has the right “companion.” They live in Occupied Paris, flee when their Resistance cell is blown, and survive.

“Dance First” spends little to no time in the creative fervor that drove Beckett’s writing after the war, suggesting guilt over a murdered comrade was the impulse to write “Godot,” “Krapp’s Last Tape” and “Endgame,” revolutionizing the theater, fitting a trio of novels and made-for-BBC radio dramas in between these landmark plays.

We glimpse only one show — “Play” (1962) — which features its three characters acting with their heads sticking out of gigantic urns.

The relationship dramas of his life, with the long-suffering Suzanne the only one canny enough to insist he keep composing his works in French so that they could be paid twice “for the translation,” and BBC Barbara (Bray) is both the classic “other woman” soap opera and key to his rising reputation because Bray was sleeping with him while also reviewing his works for various British media.

There is a lot more to Beckett than this melodramatic side of his life, and Marsh and Forsyth’s chief blunder is in showing us so little by way of introduction to why he’s still the exemplar of theatrical minimalism, a key figure in the Theatre of the Absurd, why her merits having bridge shaped like an Irish harp named for him in Dublin, and a whole class of Irish patrol boats (named for the first vessel in its class) as well.

Those with little acquaintance with his novels, poems, plays or film won’t have that “Why Beckett matters?” question answered. And those who do are sure to find this meditation frustrating in its lack of explanation and celebration.

Byrne is “right” and quite good at showing us the artist reluctant to accept the late-life accolades. O’Shea gets across the conflicted, emotionally stunted egoist consumed by his art and Gillen auditions for a Great Joyce biopic to come.

But Byrne will only get one crack at Beckett, and it isn’t great. With Joyce, as well as Beckett, we’re unlikely to ever get more than one film telling that life story. “Dance First” isn’t exactly bad. It’s just too narrow in focus, too incomplete, a biopic that leaves us “waiting” for an elusive, mythic “author” to truly make his entrance.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Sandrine Bonnaire, Aiden Gillen, Bronagh Gallagher, Gráinne Good, Lisa Dwyer Hoff, Maxine Peak and Finn O’Shea.

Credits: Directed by James Marsh, scripted by Neil Forsyth, based on the . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:40