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Photo: Dean Rogers / 101 Studios

It’s unusual for a film to arrive in theaters labeled “Director’s Cut,” but it’s happening with The Current War, a historical film about the tech face-off between irascible inventor Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and genteel industrialist George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon). The film’s themes are integrity, the damaging effects of powerful men, and the importance of savvy branding — and those same themes have played out in the film’s release just as much as they’ve turned up on-screen.

The “Director’s Cut” label ensures that even the most casual filmgoers will have a sense that something strange is at play with The Current War. The drama about the early days of electricity is hitting theaters more than two years after it premiered to tepid reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival. The version that played there had reportedly been heavily reworked by producer Harvey Weinstein. After Weinstein’s sexual abuse disgrace and The Weinstein Company’s collapse left the project in limbo, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) got the unprecedented chance to bring the film back to his original vision. His faster-paced “Director’s Cut” is 10 minutes shorter, includes five new scenes, and features a brand-new score, not to mention a ready-made narrative about a filmmaker overcoming the odds.

In its new form, The Current War is neither a game-changer nor a dud. It’s a solid period piece that strives to be something more, and occasionally achieves it. The Current War is a bit of a dad movie, one that will likely pair nicely with the upcoming Ford v Ferrari. But it’s helped along by fascinating source material and a few moments of poignancy that land with welcome heft. Particularly for history buffs or tech enthusiasts, The Current War is worth sitting through the bad stuff to get to the good.

Set between 1880 and 1893, The Current War centers on the rivalry between Edison — at the film’s opening, a major celebrity for developing light bulbs — and Westinghouse, a mogul with his own ideas about how to bring artificial light to America. The battle focuses on which electrical system the country will adopt — Edison’s direct current (DC), or Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC). As the two men race to win the bid to light up the Chicago World’s Fair, The Current War also intermittently checks in on soft-spoken Serbian immigrant Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), a futurist who’s too busy dreaming up groundbreaking designs to turn his mental acumen into tangible business success.

In spite of the 19th-century setting, Gomez-Rejon clearly doesn’t want The Current War to play as a standard period piece. The film barrels ahead at an absolutely frenetic pace, occasionally calling to mind that much-mocked Bohemian Rhapsody scene where the camera can’t settle on any given actor for more than a second. Working with Park Chan-wook’s go-to cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, Gomez-Rejon is desperate to ensure The Current War never bores the audience. Not since the original Thor has a film featured so many unmotivated Dutch angles. And then there are the dramatic circular pans, intense close-ups, and fisheye-lens shots, all deployed seemingly at random. The loopy aesthetic occasionally calls to mind Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, another recent period piece with modern flair. But The Current War lacks that film’s purposefulness and cohesion.

Photo: Dean Rogers / 101 Studios

Still, while Gomez-Rejon’s visual aesthetic is a bit of a gimmick, it’s sometimes successful. The Current War is attention-grabbing, even if viewers are just paying attention because they’re trying to puzzle out the bizarre visual choices. Working from a script by playwright Michael Mitnick, Gomez-Rejon effectively turns a complex 13-year rivalry into a streamlined narrative. On-screen text hovers over major players to introduce them and clarify their relationships. Red and yellow lightbulbs marking out territories on a giant US map provide an easy way to track the footholds Edison and Westinghouse are gaining across the country. The film leaps ahead years at a time without losing track of its central story. While The Current War sometimes feels like a Wikipedia page brought to life, it’s at least an appreciably coherent one.

As Gomez-Rejon sees it, the war between Edison and Westinghouse isn’t just a personal or professional rivalry, it’s a battle for the future of the nation. The more cost-effective AC system would eventually allow the entire country to access electricity. The DC system will leave it as a privilege for the rich — which Edison doesn’t mind, so long as he gets the glory of winning the race.

Photo: Dean Rogers / 101 Studios

As Edison uses animal-killing stunts to manipulate the public into thinking AC is unsafe, Tesla privately makes a timely socialist argument for the importance of treating technological advancements as public goods. In another relevant connection to the present, Gomez-Rejon emphasizes that groundbreaking technology often brings problematic side effects along with improvements. He juxtaposes the uplifting World’s Fair storyline with a fascinating tangent about the creation of the electric chair, which played its own dark, dramatic role in the Edison / Westinghouse rivalry.

Unfortunately, The Current War too often fails to bring a human heart to its intellectually stimulating ideas. The film doesn’t translate its palpable reverence for Tesla into a dramatically compelling through line. Hoult can’t escape the shadow of David Bowie’s memorable Tesla portrayal in The Prestige, either, although one glorious scene does let Hoult emerge as the comedic character actor he was born to be.

Cumberbatch, meanwhile, is hampered by both his terrible American accent and the way his brilliant but bullish Edison feels like a carbon copy of so many of the tortured-genius roles he’s played before. The darker side of Edison’s personality never entirely meshes with the sentimental attempts to humanize him, primarily his underdeveloped friendship with loyal personal secretary Samuel Insull. (He’s played in an endearing way by current Spider-Man Tom Holland, whose Marvel Cinematic Universe reunion with Cumberbatch is occasionally a little distracting.)

Photo: Dean Rogers / 101 Studios

Playing the least familiar figure in the film, Shannon winds up giving the most compelling performance. The Current War is the latest in a long line of projects that prove he can bring across quiet decency as well as (or better than) over-the-top villainy. There’s an intriguing thread about Westinghouse’s relationship with his forward-thinking wife Marguerite (a wonderful Katherine Waterston), although as with most of the subplots, The Current War doesn’t take much time to dig into it. Still, in a movie that often plays like Amadeus for electricity, Shannon makes an effective Salieri to Cumberbatch’s Mozart. The Current War also bears more than a passing resemblance to Aaron Sorkin’s 2007 Broadway play The Farnsworth Invention, which traces a similar rivalry between two men racing to invent television.

Though The Current War centers on three great men of history, Gomez-Rejon tries in some ways to dismantle the traditional line of thinking about innovators. He raises pointed questions about the clash between the collaborative nature of scientific innovation and America’s habit of framing its technological leaps as the result of heroic pioneers single-handedly changing history. As The Current War sees it, Edison’s publicity skills earned him a prominent place in the history books, as much as his engineering prowess. Tesla and Westinghouse didn’t seek personal glory in the same way, which makes it harder to know how to celebrate their work, other than to retroactively turn them into great men of history as well. The Current War kind of does that, too.

In trying to have it both ways, Gomez-Rejon can’t quite recontextualize history the way he wants to. Yet even if The Current War is soft around the edges and a little soggy in the middle, there’s still something appreciably sparky at its core. As overstuffed and frenetic as the film is, in its best moments, The Current War manages to make an everyday utility seem just as magical as it did 120 years ago.

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