Review: In ‘The Young Karl Marx,’ a Scruffy Specter Haunts Europe

The history of the world may be the history of class struggle, but the history of class struggle — at least the decisive chapter chronicled in “The Young Karl Marx” — turns out to be a buddy movie. Marx (August Diehl), a scruffy journalist, and his sidekick Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske), a renegade rich kid, meet in Cologne, Germany, in 1844 and overcome some initial wariness by bonding over their shared contempt for the Young Hegelians. (Man, those guys are lame.) They set out to write a “Critique of Critical Criticism,” and when it’s published (as “The Holy Family”), it’s something of a hit. By the time the revolutions of 1848 are ready to happen, Marx and Engels are the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the European left, rock stars for an age of revolution.

Scrupulously faithful to the biographical record, “The Young Karl Marx,” directed by Raoul Peck (from a script he wrote with Pascal Bonitzer), is both intellectually serious and engagingly free-spirited. The founders of communism, full of intensity and ambition and sporting contrasting beards, look and act like pioneers of brocialism. They spend some drunken evenings hashing out the labor theory of value — Engels holds his liquor better than Marx — and many hours, together and separately, in furious paroxysms of thought. Thinking notoriously resists being captured on film, and Peck often falls back on its most common analogues, scribbling and smoking. Marx in particular does a lot of those things. But Diehl’s performance is a marvel of itchy intelligence, and it strips away almost all of the character’s accumulated importance. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” a slightly older Marx wrote, and what is most remarkable, indeed most exciting, about “The Young Marx” is how lightly that burden rests upon it.

Peck’s earlier features include “Lumumba,” a scripted biography of the Congolese leader, and “I am Not Your Negro,” a documentary drawn from the work of James Baldwin. (His résumé also includes a stint as Haiti’s minister of culture.) While in form and style the new movie is a fairly straightforward biopic, it is also fundamentally the portrait of a writer, a man of letters grappling with both the mundane and the lofty demands of his vocation.

Until his partnership with Engels is solidified — and access to some of the Engelses’ wealth is secured — Marx struggles with deadlines, antagonizes editors and lives in bohemian penury with his wife, Jenny (Vicky Krieps), and their infant daughter. The family is harassed by bill collectors and also by the police, bouncing from Cologne to Paris to Brussels as Marx’s political agitation brands him a dangerous subversive. He is also embroiled in a series of volatile alliances with eminent figures of the European left, notably Wilhelm Weitling (Alexander Scheer), a bombastic orator whose ideas sound vaporous at best, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (the marvelous Olivier Gourmet), a good-natured philosopher who seems to be the hardest-working anarchist in show business. Those names are fairly obscure today, while Marx’s is still attached to an -ism, however battered. (Does that count as a spoiler?) He and Engels stage both a theoretical and an organizational coup, replacing utopian nostrums about the brotherhood of man with a doctrine of conflict between the proletarian and the bourgeoisie. The rest is history, bloody and contentious and not yet finished.

Marx and Engels’ takeover of a stodgy workers’ rights group, the League of the Just, is a premonition of the ruthlessness that would become characteristic of communist parties in the 20th century. To put it in the language of 21st-century capitalism, the founders of communism are disrupters and innovators, possessing the entrepreneurial doggedness and self-righteous zeal required to bend the world to their will.

“The Young Karl Marx” is a highly individualized picture of the authors of a doctrine of collective struggle. This contradiction (to use Marxist vocabulary) is what energizes the film and rescues it from the twin dangers of tedium and sentimentality. There are other knots of irony and dialectical difficulty, notably as for women’s status within the global program of emancipation the two dudes grandly envision.

Jenny Marx is a rebellious Prussian aristocrat; Engels’ wife, Mary Burns (Hannah Steele), is a rebellious Irish factory worker. The two women provide a degree of centrifugal energy, pulling the story away from politics toward matters of the heart and hearth. But they also, for exactly that reason, expose gaps in their husbands’ emerging theory of inequality and exploitation. Jenny and Mary support Karl and Friedrich’s work wholeheartedly, but also within the parameters of a division of labor that seems beyond the reach of their politics. They clear the dishes, tend the children, hand out flyers and hang banners — part of the history but also at its margins.

I’m not suggesting that this is a lapse on Peck’s part. On the contrary, the way his film deals with family matters and gender relations is an aspect of its precision and a measure of its insight. The great virtue of “The Young Karl Marx” is its clarity, its ability to perceive the way the eddies of personal experience flow within the wider stream of history.

— Production notes”

“The Young Karl Marx”

Not rated. In German, French and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.