Frankly, one senses that if Whale had infinite resources, he’d just as soon have made a movie about Mary, the young woman whose nightmare still electrifies modern dreams. Yet studios have long balked at the stranger-than-fiction life of Mary Wolstoncraft Shelley (née Godwin), and judging by Haifaa Al-Mansour’s overdue biopic on the literary icon, it’s been perhaps because of the same reason Miss Godwin was so easily dismissed by publishers in her day: Who wants to hear this kind of tale from a woman? The film itself lets audiences know exactly what kind of biopic it is when it opens on precocious Mary scribbling away in her journal of verse while sitting atop the grave of her mother Mary Wollstencraft. The elder Mary was a feminist and thinker for her age in the previous century, a feat which her namesake feels constantly measured against, as her mother died shortly after our heroine’s birth. So Fanning’s Mary toils away in her father’s under-lit London bookshop, listening to William Godwin’s (Stephen Dillane) philosophies about love and life while pining to live them. The chance comes when she meets Percy at a party. Portrayed as something of an early 19th century pop star on the rise, Booth’s Percy is all gentle smiles and idol-ready looks. He is also wise not to bring up the whole wife thing. Soon enough he is apprenticing for Mary’s father, and meeting with her at their real-life secret rendezvous location: her mother’s grave. Yet stolen trysts among the dead turn into sordid scandals for the living, as Mary and her step-sister Claire (Bel Powley) run off with the writer to live a bohemian life that sounds much more romantic than its reality. Mary Shelley is a handsomely mounted production that ever looks so much like a Goth kid’s daydream of the teenage writer. Cast in a perpetual gray and sunless world that would be as fitting for a Hammer Horror movie as it would be about the Early Romantic transcendentalists of its day, the film is all candlelight and stolen glances, which makes for a fine, if often glossy effect. The script by Emma Jensen (with some re-working by Al-Mansour) is more problematic, however. In a bid for a modern feminist critique of Percy Shelley and his undeniably abhorrent selfishness, the film leans too much on speechifying and Mary’s frequent decrees of judgement on all other parties who occupy this story. These concessions to our current sensibility can sometimes be empowering, especially when she stares down her first of many condescending publishers, yet it also robs the story of living inside the heads of these contemporary minds that, however flawed, provided thoughts that centuries later are still parsed over. In addition to casting Percy as a callow and unsympathetic libertine (which he probably was), it reduces the sometimes sordid and questionable choices of Mary, or for that matter Claire, into being fairly black-and-white. The actual contest that inspired Frankenstein and the subsequent writing of her masterpiece also quickens the film for a stirring third act, as Mary’s fall into the moral degradation of Byron’s summer home teases the more decadent movie that is hidden away in the film’s fairly demure presentation. Sturridge takes a particularly broad turn as Byron, a figure who was so large in his own life that one cannot fault the actor for crossing a line that never existed. At its best, the film reminds audiences that these lauded poets and novelists lived lives not made of porcelain and silk, but of mud, hardship, and very bad decisions. Rather than literary gods, they’re rich young things with often wicked thoughts. But those wicked thoughts are still so enticing that they can turn an adequate biopic into a worthwhile one. Mary Shelley premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 28 and opens theatrically on May 25.