Grade: A-

Verdict: A beautiful movie.

Details: Starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly and Ed Harris. Directed by Ron Howard. Rated PG-13 for disturbing scenes of mental illness. Two hours, 9 minutes.

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Review: It's virtually impossible to tell you how good “A Beautiful Mind” is without spoiling it for you. So you'll just have to trust me: This is a really good movie.

It's a true story (with a lot of omissions) based on the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., a Nobel Prize-winning mathematics genius who suffers from severe paranoia (Nash is still alive). What the film is about, essentially, is a brilliant mind playing mind games with its own unquiet self. And while director Ron Howard lays it on a bit thick, his star, the astonishing Russell Crowe, countermands him scene after scene.

Nash's story begins in 1947 when he and a select group of preening brainiacs arrive at Princeton University to study mathematics. The postwar time-frame is important: The United States is just emerging from World War II which, as a professor tells them, was won by mathematicians. So they're not just bright guys; they're the country's future.

An eccentric loner from West Virginia, Nash is as arrogant — perhaps more so — than any of his peers. He's obsessed with one thing: finding the idea that will make him matter. Eventually he does, which Howard plays out in an amusing way.

The ensuing acclaim wins Nash a coveted teaching and research job at M.I.T. It's there that he meets Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), a physics student who loves him for his oddball mind, not in spite of it. And it's there that he meets a shadowy government agent (Ed Harris) who recruits him for a top-secret project.

But something is wrong. Something that sends Nash into a downward spiral of madness and depression.

The beauty of “A Beautiful Mind” is how deftly it draws us into Nash's delusions. Alicia loyally stands by him — an aspect of the film that borders on film biography cliché — but things get pretty rough.

Howard's clean, forceful direction is a good balance for Akiva Goldsman's unsubtle script. Their film is fearless in its depiction of schizophrenia, which is presented as very real, very scary and very much a disease. This is not madness as whimsy or anti-authority rebellion. It's madness as something difficult, something intrusive, something literally sickening.

“A Beautiful Mind” is pretty much Crowe's show. Connelly is strong (and could nab a best supporting actress nomination at Oscar time) as is Harris (a long-shot for best supporting actor). There's also fine work by Paul Bettany as Nash's self-described “prodigal rommmate” and by Josh Lucas and Anthony Rapp as his Princeton rivals.

But Crowe's complex performance makes the movie seem tighter, more thrilling, perhaps, than it actually is. Note his eyes as he watches a pickup football game from his dorm window, reflexively transforming the moves into a numerical pattern. His Nash is drowning in numbers, and he doesn't mind in the least — until he tries to come up for air.

“A Beautiful Mind” is what an inspirational movie should be. The sentimentality is a given. So is the triumph-of-the-human-spirit stuff. But this picture really is a triumph. By the time it's over, the mushy parts matter a lot less than Crowe's exceptional performance.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)