At the end of his life, Russian author Leo Tolstoy (played here by an impressively bewhiskered Christopher Plummer) was a huge celebrity in his native land and inspired the fervent dedication of a group who followed his philosophies and teachings, calling themselves Tolstoyans. As portrayed in director Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station, one gets the sense of the group — those that settled on a plot of land near Tolstoy’s own home, anyway — as an early hippie commune. Minus the sex and drugs of course, both of which were frowned upon by Tolstoyan doctrine.

As a period biopic, Hoffman’s film is rather sedate and ordinary. While well-crafted, with an elegant visual sense and careful attention to period detail, it too often falls victim to its own melodrama — particularly as it drops the somewhat tongue-in-cheek tone of its early scenes.

This early portion of the film focuses primarily on Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), a young writer who applies to become Tolstoy’s personal secretary, getting the job after an awkward interview with a close adviser of Tolstoy, and one of the leaders of the Tolstoyan movement, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). Valentin is a ball of nerves in this stage of the movie — his interview, his first meetings with Tolstoy, his assimilation into the commune — fidgety, uncomfortable, and given to fits of sneezing whenever overcome by his anxieties, an idiosyncrasy played fairly effectively for laughs.