It is a cliché that there are some performers people would watch reading from a phone book. An exaggeration, perhaps, but the leads in this movie, Mark Rylance and Sally Hawkins, approach that status for me. I also appreciated and recognized Mark Lewis Jones, though I knew not from where as I watched. As it happens, he had starred masterfully in the modern classic limited dramatic series Chernobyl.

But this film is not nearly as serious as that excellent work, focusing as it does on a minor tragedy, which is to say the personal travails of a novice golfer. He takes up the sport innocently believing he can practice his way to being able to play with the big boys, but only manages to entertain rather than excel. The movie is not a tragedy or even a serious drama really, but rather a feel good biopic of an Everyman who achieved fame of a sort by sticking with an impossible dream.

It is not a subtle or particularly deep movie, so I don’t believe I will watch it more than once as I have other films these actors have starred in, but it was a fun watch.