A rampant favourite for this year’s Best Film award come Oscar night – though by no stretch of the imagination the year’s finest cinema offering – A Beautiful Mind is certainly an expertly-crafted piece of work.

Undeniably powerful, ruthlessly emotive, deeply manipulative but competent in the extreme, it’s the (somewhat sanitised) life-story of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, his marriage and his recurring battles with paranoid schizophrenia.

Very similar in tone to the uplifting, triumphal melodrama of Shine, the film is commercially sussed enough to soften the darker aspects of Nash’s story, wary of scaring audiences away, but it’s never less than hugely watchable. Reliable journeyman director Ron Howard (Ransom, ED-TV) pushes all the right emotional buttons, but it’s the two standout central performances that lift A Beautiful Mind above the ordinary. Russell Crowe’s efforts look likely to gain him his second straight Best Actor statute, and it would probably be more deserved this time out than was the case with Gladiator. While it’ s initially difficult to seriously swallow the musclebound brute as any sort of mathematician, Crowe tackles the Nash role with admirable fearlessness, and if the film never even comes close to accurately conveying the twenty-four-hour torture chamber that the illness represents, that owes more to the script than to any flaws in Crowe’s performance. While not exactly playing it for laughs, he invests Nash with a sense of humour (though of the smart-arsed pedantic variety) and also manages to express genuine terror during the breakdown scenes.

The film’s great flaw is also, in box-office and Oscar terms, its huge strength: a terminal reluctance to address schizophrenia with the merciless destructiveness that the subject probably merits. There are hallucination sequences, paranoid delusions and a spot of electro-convulsive therapy to be seen in A Beautiful Mind, but their net impact could hardly be described as harrowing. Nash’s imaginary CIA pursuers (Ed Harris and Paul Bettany) are objects of fear about as terrifying as the puppy in the Andrex ads, and the ECT scene would elicit hoots of laughter from anyone who made it through Requiem For a Dream. In a curious irony, Jennifer Connelly – one of Requiem’s stars – plays Nash’s loving wife with typical warmth, intelligence and assurance, and has herself landed a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It’s her serenity, and Crowe’s complete lack of it, that anchor the film so firmly, ensuring that its flaws seem minor ones in perspective.

There’s no doubt that A Beautiful Mind is an impressive, polished and highly dramatic affair, and probably even worthy of an Oscar or two. Nonetheless, as biography, the film is extremely problematic. It has elected to completely overlook Nash’s bisexuality, his child out of wedlock and his divorce, and the feelgood prize-winning ending seems a shade too upbeat in the context of a tragic, tortured life blighted by a horrific illness. Still, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will be powerless to resist.