“The Chaperone” (M) *** and a half

THE screenplay for “The Chaperone” telling how 16-year-old Louise Brooks shed the shackles of middle-class life in Wichita, Kansas, in 1922 to become a member of a modern dance company and later the star of 17 silent and eight sound films between 1925 and 1938, is the work of Julian Fellowes.

It’s subtle, clever writing, drawing on a book by Laura Moriarty telling about Louise’s career that began when in 1922 she was offered a place at the New York school of modern dance conducted by Ruth St Dennis (Miranda Otto) and Ted Shawn (Robert Fairchild). Director Michael Engler’s debut feature film (after a distinguished career in TV series and telemovies) begins at that point. Louise’s mother was reluctant to send her daughter so far at age 16 without a chaperone. And that, more than the events in Louise’s life, is the seed from which the film grows.

Elizabeth McGovern plays Norma Carlisle, wife of a Wichita lawyer, mother in her early 40s of two adult sons, who volunteered to chaperone the teenager in the big city.

The subtleties of the raw materials that Fellowes provided give McGovern the wherewithal to deliver a strong emotional current of charm and verity. The unremarkable woman who actually went with Louise (that Louise went to New York with that chaperone is fact) is replaced by a woman whom the film slowly develops into somebody whose real objective was to find her own identity. Norma’s search has occupied her adult life. The key to unlocking its mysteries lies with the handyman in a New York orphanage run by Catholic nuns.

While Norma is genuinely fond of Louise, Louise has other fish to fry. Haley Lu Richardson plays her deftly. Her dance movements are a delight to watch. Depicting a child wise beyond her years suddenly turned loose in the figurative candy store, her maturity in fulfilling her womanly yearnings is convincing.

At all cinemas