THE YOUNG KARL MARX Review: A Critique of a Critic's Criticisms

My enemies are all too familiar

They're the ones who used to call me friend

I'm coloring outside your guidelines

I was passing out when you were passing out your rules

One, two, three, four

Who's punk? What's the score?

Photo Credit: The Young Karl Marx/IMDb

When punk band Jawbreaker released “Boxcar” in 1994, they were skewering the overly committed members of their scene. You know the ones: They’re rankling people who were very recently their friends, they’re challenging everyone on their scene-specific bonafides, they’re picking fights and growing overly pleased with themselves for their self-perceived purity, all while forgetting to make the connections and express the humility that are essential to advancing whatever interests they (and their scene, whether it’s a music genre or a political cause) have.

Jawbreaker may as well have been talking about Karl Marx, who ambled his way through Europe as a poor, ambitious rabble-rouser out to spit in the face of the rich and bring about a workers’ revolution through his provocative pamphlets and connections to leftist French politicians.

In the 135 years since Marx’s death, he’s attained a mythical stature. Filmmaker Raoul Peck, who directed and co-wrote The Young Karl Marx, gives his revolutionary, communist ideals the weight they deserve relative to the impact they had on the human race—his ideas fueled the world’s divisions for half of the 20th century, after all. But when it comes to Marx, the man, Peck is much less impressed.

“Enough fighting with pins,” says German actor August Diehl as a 20-something Marx in an early scene. “I want sledgehammers.”

He has no patience for the fundamentally unfair system he’s in, but he has even less patience for those who are not fighting that system as violently as he wants. Diehl’s hair is a loud, curly mess that stands above his head like he’s a 19th century Wolverine, and he has the demeanor to match. He’s like a surly child who can’t get what he wants, so he throws his colleagues at a failing magazine under the bus when the police come to break up their subversive little literary club. Marx doesn’t see his allies as sufficiently committed to the cause, so he wants to teach them a lesson—by getting everyone arrested. “A few nights in jail will do us good,” he says, both overestimating the rehabilitative effects of less than a week in jail and underestimating the severity of his brashness—he’s deported.

His pettiness and self-involvement follow him wherever he goes, as he loses friends—but, miraculously, still influences people. He ruins his family financially on more than one occasion, which leads his wife, Jenny (Vicky Krieps, fresh off her star-making turn in Phantom Thread), to remark that his greatest flaw is that he is “unfair.” It’s almost as if the man calling for the leveling of the social hierarchy was—gasp!—a hypocrite.

Peck’s film is a critique of a man who changed the world, or at least affiliated himself with and influenced those who did. Peck gets righteous, incendiary performances from the actors as a coterie of revolutionaries in 1840s Europe. Elder statesmen in the leftist movement dismiss Marx and his best friend, Engels (Stefan Konarske), as “pretentious brats” who may very well be the smartest men in any room, but they certainly aren’t the wisest or most prudent thanks to their impatience and hatred for anyone who challenges them. One such challenge comes from another would-be ally who has been put off by these men. He speaks angry-yet-cautionary words to those falling under the young upstarts’ spell:

“Criticism devours everything that exists. And when there is nothing left, it devours itself.”

Marx and Engels, heeding no one’s advice, strong-arm their way to the top of the first major organized communist organization in the West, effectively ousting all former allies who would serve as calming presences in a room that is otherwise growing too heated.

These great performances are a relief because the cinematography by Kolja Brandt is as flat and unimaginative as it gets. Like essentially every other glossy, “important” biopic or period piece released in the last 10 years (think The Imitation Game, The King’s Speech, Snowden, et al), The Young Karl Marx appears to exist in a world where the color red doesn’t exist. Everything is gray-blue, gray-green, gray-gray. This is, of course, a choice meant to highlight the plight of the working class, Marx’s family’s own poverty, and the gloomy days ahead for the communist movement (the Bolshevik Revolution did not happen until more than 30 years after Marx’s death). But it’s a plodding and dull choice, one that does not match the fury inside the protagonist and his movement, nor does it help to juxtapose the glitzy lives of the rich at the time with their unappreciated employees—costume designer Paule Mangenot’s terrific period clothing can only do so much without any help from the camera. Brandt’s work lays an overly academic and clinical gauze atop this story about passion and passion’s pitfalls, and it sanitizes every biting piece of satire that Peck and the actors bring to the material.

But at least the movie leaves us with Diehl, with all his rage, staring out at the world he disdains. He has shaped a movement by the time he’s in his early 30s, even if he’s only left with a few people who would truly go to bat for him thanks to his increasingly impossibly rigorous demands of his allies. His ideas may have taken off, but his personal orbit has shrunk to a bubble, one that could pop at any moment. Much like the gung-ho scenesters in the Jawbreaker song, Marx is all alone and he’s on his own.

Director: Raoul Peck

Writers: Pascal Bonitzer, Raoul Peck, Pierre Hodgson

Starring: August Diehl, Stefan Konarske, Vicky Krieps, Olivier Gourmet, Hannah Steele

Available in limited release now