"It's not about having the right answers, but asking the right questions." That's the very apt moral summation articulated near the end of the appealing British film Starter for 10 (Picturehouse).
Set in the mid-1980s, with appropriate period trappings and a fitting musical soundtrack, the story concerns Brian Jackson (James McAvoy), a gauche, working-class student from the town of Essex, who leaves his widowed mom (Catherine Tate) and best friend Spencer (Dominic Cooper) to study at Bristol University. Spencer chides him for his academic social climbing, but we can see he's simply afraid of losing his friend.
Once at Bristol, Brian's lifelong penchant for trivia makes him a natural to join the four-person team competing on "University Challenge," an actual game show akin to the old "College Bowl" series in the US (The film title derives from the first question on the show, which garners 10 points.)
Though he doesn't make the roster, after he sneaks an answer to Alice (Alice Eve), the pretty blonde would-be teammate across the aisle — an act with reverberations later on — fate soon brings him back to the squad, where he's reluctantly welcomed by pompous self-appointed team captain Patrick (the versatile Benedict Cumberbatch, so good as Prime Minister William Pitt in Amazing Grace).
Wildly smitten with Alice, Brian's also drawn to the no-nonsense campus activist, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall). Ignorant of his mother's emotional needs, he gets a rude surprise when he travels home for the holidays and discovers his widowed mother has taken up with one of their neighbors. Eventually Spencer shows up unexpectedly on campus, reminding Brian of his middle-class roots, and causing all kinds of trouble, romantic and otherwise. On the day of the big competition –for which the rival team hails from a more upper-crust school, underscoring the class differential yet again — matters take yet another surprising turn.
Director Tom Vaughan's coming-of-age story, adapted from a novel by David Nicholls, features good performances all around, most especially by the engaging 28-year-old McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland), here convincingly playing a teen. Both of the young women in his life are etched empathetically by actors with solid theatrical lineage: Eve, the daughter of actor Trevor Eve, and Hall, the daughter of theater director Sir Peter Hall.
By the movie's end, Brian has learned appropriate life lessons beyond the encyclopedic mental storehouse he thought was so important.
The film contains brief sexual content and innuendo, some crass language, brief drug use, brief light violence and partial nudity. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
