Rebel in the Rye

Young Jerry Salinger wants to be a writer and his father does not take it seriously. At Columbia he meets a teacher named Whit Burnett who teaches him one thing: how to finish a story. Then the war comes, and by the time he returns from the Normandy landings and the Hürtgen Forest both the man and what he writes have changed. Danny Strong adapted Kenneth Slawenski's biography and chooses to explain not so much how The Catcher in the Rye was written as why the writer withdrew from publishing entirely. Nicholas Hoult plays Salinger and Kevin Spacey the teacher. It never leaves the biopic template, and the link it draws between postwar trauma and flight from fame is its soundest quality. Who it is for: viewers who like writers' biographies and anyone interested in Salinger. Who it is not for: those wanting formal invention, since the film never strains the mould.