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HBO should get credit for doing what it usually does: trying to create entertainment that doesn’t adhere to norms but still manages to tell its audience something they didn’t already know. Sometimes, however, they get stuck between two modes, and this is glaringly apparent in the new HBO film, Hemingway & Gellhorn.

Starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen as Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, the movie is basically about their much fabled love story. And while it’s all lovely to look at and ponder over in the way that epic love stories between famous 20th century figures usually are, there just isn’t as much there as the makers might want us to believe. It’s the same problem that ultimately brought down Baz Luhrmann’s Australia which also starred Kidman: it looks epic and sounds epic. It just doesn’t feel all that epic in the end. In fact, very few moments in the film stand out as being innovative or novel, which is ironic considering it’s about two writers. It all feels very ‘by-the-book’. That’s so not HBO!

The triumph of the movie are its performances. Kidman gives the best performance she’s given since her Oscar winning turn as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (where she also played a famous 20th century writer). She gives Gellhorn a multitude of dimensions and makes her much more interesting than women of that era are generally thought to have been. If this were a cinematic release, she’d be getting tons of Oscar buzz.

There isn’t much in the way of chemistry between Kidman and her co-star, but Owen clearly relishes his part as the man who could certainly be named the most fascinatingly tragic writer of the last 100 years. Hemingway was a difficult and often times abrasive character, concerned not only with his own emotional burden, but with the nature of writing and creating. To Owen’s credit, he does not spend much time at all trying to get the audience to like Hemingway. He is presented as he was: complex, difficult, and entirely unaesthetic.

The film deserves to be looked at by all who appreciate a good effort; effort, unfortunately, does not always pan out with intended results.