In director Michael Almereyda’s poetic hands, genius inventor Nikola Tesla is an absorbing if brooding subject. In Almereyda’s latest movie Tesla, he is the focus, and played by Ethan Hawke who had starred as Hamlet—the archetypical absorbing if brooding subject– in Almereyda’s 2000 movie. Here Tesla fascinates, having also been depicted, a secondary character in 2019, in Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War, played by Nicholas Hoult. In this past December’s run-ups to Oscars, in the last gasp of influencer screenings, Michael Shannon who stars as George Westinghouse in that movie asked if the Motion Picture Academy members were paying attention to that very special and important truth-based drama. Alas, I had to report, they were not. This glimpse of history was simply not electric. And Almereyda’s movie, now screening as part of a tribute to his oeuvre at the Museum of the Moving Image, may not be on the awards radar either, but in its poetry of image, performance, an a-chronology of vision, it is a bold and beautiful work, and memorable for Ethan Hawke’s Tesla. You’ve gotta love his slightly off rendition of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

A word about Ethan Hawke who has made this odd period of time passable for me: In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, he is Hank, the American husband of Lumir, a character played by Juliette Binoche and son-in-law to Catherine Deneuve’s Fabienne who has just written a memoir. Think everything you know about European attitudes toward American behavior. The one syllable name says it all: he’s a cypher. Hawke takes all in perfectly, graciously supporting the women. Maybe he’s embodying a principle he admires in a recent TED talk when he elaborates on poet Allen Ginsberg’s willingness to play a public fool, as if it were an obligation. Or taking on the subject of flea markets, as he did, supporting Michael Ripa’s riveting book, The Golden Flea, in a Zoom tete-a-tete, saying that he starts his day with water colors in examining the ebbs and flows of what it is to be human. I hear that he will do an audio book of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Continuity with Hawke is an energy fix.