Highbrow pedigree is mostly window dressing for a commercial period romance about Germany's literary giant.

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As its English-language title indicates, Philipp Stoelzl's yarn is clearly modeled on "Shakespeare in Love." But though it lacks that film's delirious wordplay, this German cousin is well plotted and impressively mounted.

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Whatever its basis in fact, there’s nothing to Young Goethe In Love’s story that dozens of other films haven’t done before, and better.

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That this film was originally titled Goethe! should give you a sense of how much silly Sturm und Drang boosterism awaits.

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"Young Goethe in Love" has an awesome array of authentic settings that drench the film in period atmosphere and capable stars Alexander Fehling in the title role and Miriam Stein playing Goethe's great love and muse Lotte Buff.

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Mr. Fehling, tumbling from puppy dog eagerness into weepy, inky self-pity, never quite rises to the requirements of the role, which may be hopelessly incoherent in any case.

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“Young Goethe” looks great, and the cast is appealing. But the story is riddled with clichés and fabrications, like a duel between Lotte’s two suitors.

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With "Goethe," Mr. Stölzl takes the writer's artistic achievement and synthesis of real-life experience and turns it back on itself, while imposing upon it dramatic conventions that Goethe himself would have greeted with a resounding "Nein!"

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'Young Goethe in Love' is an irreverent take on the German literary genius, who loses some gravitas in this tale of youth and unrequited love.

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Watch the German author get drunk, meet his soul mate and become a literary rock star.

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What unfolds is a predictably anguished story of true love thwarted by material circumstances, or in the terms dictated by the film, rationality triumphing over romance.

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