Stefan Konarske, left, and August Diehl in The Young Karl Marx (The Orchard)

 Two hundred years ago this year, Karl Marx, one of the most influential thinkers of all time, was born. Marx is generally thought of as a haggard, massively-bearded old man, whose ideas are thoroughly 19th century. Yet with recent polls showing that millennials are fed up with capitalism, it is clear that Marx’s ideas are as alive as ever and there is a huge appetite for a critique of capitalism among the younger set.

For this reason, the new film The Young Karl Marx could not be more aptly titled or more well-timed. It is an exhaustively researched, meticulously detailed, historically impeccable depiction of Marx’s tumultuous life from 1843–1848, ending when he turns 30. Anyone interested in the roots of this incredible thinker, whose writings shook the world, can do no better than watching this film.

Director and screenwriter Raoul Peck, whose James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro was nominated for last year’s Oscars, has a knack for making smart, timely films about revolutionaries. While that film was necessarily short, since it was based on only 30 pages of notes for a book project that Baldwin didn’t live to finish, The Young Karl Marx suffers from no such shortage of source material. Indeed, there is so much to work with in bringing Marx’s young adulthood to life—from his vast correspondences, his travels from Germany to France to England meeting the prominent revolutionaries of his time, to his many pamphlets and articles—that it is astounding how precise and disciplined this biopic is. The filmmakers could easily have lost themselves in minutia and locales, but they managed to coalesce a clear, compelling narrative that culminates in the founding of the Communist League and the production of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 when Marx turned 30.

The film starts in Germany at the offices of the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung in 1843, with a 25- year-old Karl Marx (August Diehl) as the editor, arguing with other writers over their vagueness and lack of revolutionary zeal as spies and police lurk on the streets below. The essence of Marx’s conflict with the other editors is that they belong rigidly to the group known as the Young Hegelians, students of Hegel who were bogged down in the abstractions and vagueness of the philosophical master who had died a dozen years earlier. Marx believed that the role of the paper must be to apply precise, scientific thinking to the material conditions of social production, while his peers were content to dither about in their Hegelian fantasy world.

Marx is too controversial and radical to remain in Germany, and he flees persecution by Prussian authorities to Paris with his wife, Jenny (Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps). We see the two young lovers full of energy, enthusiasm, and trepidation as they adjust to their new lives in Paris. Karl and Jenny Marx’s marriage is a genuine love story of epic proportions, and a whole book has been written about it, so it would be impossible to fully do it credit in a film about Marx’s intellectual development. Still, Krieps brings warmth, intelligence, and vitality to her depiction of Jenny, highlighting how Marx would’ve been completely lost without her.

Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske) is also front and center, as Engels is not only the best friend, intellectual soulmate, and benefactor of Marx but the more confident and forceful public speaker as well, while Marx is sullen, distant, and often venomous. (Marx was a ruthless critic who specialized in tearing everything down, while Engels was more able to build relationships and open doors.) In a wonderful early scene, Marx and Engels express sincere respect and admiration for each other’s pioneering work, and we see them quickly bond over (many) drinks in a bar, laying out their ideas for the first time with a true intellectual equal.

A lot of time is dedicated to the antagonistic relationship between Marx and libertarian socialist (or anarchist) philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Olivier Gourmet). Yet the film does not take the easy route and portray the two as enemies but instead shows their polite disagreement. (Marx is sympathetic to Proudhon’s critique of the power structure but dissatisfied with the vagueness of Proudhon’s analysis.)

The argument between Marx and Proudhon is due to Marx’s scientific, precise approach to revolution. This strange contradiction, of revolution and scientific precision, is what made Marx so original and important, and yet this approach rubbed many of his peers the wrong way. But Marx has the integrity to stick to his belief that the key to truly improving the world is to change the relations of production between employers and their waged employees.

The film is also quite an achievement in costuming, set design, and attention to period detail, bringing viewers into the exciting world of 19th-century Paris, London, and Brussels. One problem is that it ends in 1848 with the publication of the Communist Manifesto, right before revolutions swept Europe, with Marx acting as a leading revolutionary newspaper editor for his revamped Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Hopefully, Peck is saving that material for a sequel.