Ostensibly a tale of heroic literary creation — of the volatile collaboration between an undisciplined author and his discerning editor — “Genius” is a dress-up box full of second- and thirdhand notions. Set mainly in a picturesquely brown and smoky Manhattan in the 1930s, it gives the buddy-movie treatment to that wild-man novelist Thomas Wolfe and his buttoned-up red-penciler Maxwell Perkins.

At the time, it was Wolfe who laid windy claim to the titular epithet, but history has been kinder to Perkins. A. Scott Berg’s Perkins biography, which the film cites as its source, is subtitled “Editor of Genius,” and the double meaning is clear enough. From his desk at Scribner’s, Perkins helped shape the prose of, among others, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and in the process secured his own share of literary greatness. Those guys show up briefly onscreen, impersonated by Guy Pearce (Fitzgerald) and Dominic West (Papa). Poor Zelda (Vanessa Kirby) also has a moment, looking batty at the Perkinses’ dinner table in Connecticut.

But the focus is Max (Colin Firth) and Tom (Jude Law), a weary study in temperamental contrast. Tom blusters into Max’s office with a yawping Carolina drawl and a manuscript that has been rejected by nearly every other publishing house in New York. Max, whose fedora has apparently been sewn on to his head and whose mouth is set into his face like an em-dash, reads the thing on the train home. There, mildly annoyed by the boisterous play of his many daughters and the amateur theatricals of his wife (Laura Linney), he settles into a closet to continue the manly labor of editing.