As it turns out, John Forbes Nash was quite a commanding physical presence as a young man. In the pictures included in Sylvia Nasar’s wonderful but harrowing biography of the same name on which the film is based, the young Nash exudes a jaunty self-confidence. He poses to let the camera capture him with a cockiness that makes it clear Russell Crowe is the perfect actor to portray him.

A Beautiful Mind does round off some of the very hard edges of the man, but not to the extent that the remarkable story of this very unique individual plays as anything short of extraordinary. Director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer have taken some heat for eliminating some of Nash’s less attractive biographical details. I’m sure “Biography” could produce a wonderful special that focused more on Nash’s accomplishments and the many aspects of his personal life that were unconventional, and a truer picture of his mental illness.

But what Howard has accomplished in distilling this very unusual story to its bones is wonderfully engaging and suspenseful and is spectacularly realized in every technical category. A Beautiful Mind is also about the triumph of individual spirit and the remarkable healing power of love, two themes that many aspire to illustrate on the big screen but few accomplish without becoming cloying or annoyingly sentimental. The film is so moving that I had to know more about the story of John and Alicia Nash. Sylvia Nasar’s biography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, fills in what the movie has left out.

A Beautiful Mind begins in 1947 when Nash arrives in Princeton, a prize winning scholarship student from West Virginia. An outsider from the beginning, Nash is also brash, competitive and eccentric with limited social skills but some charm and plenty of talent. He rarely attends class, spending his time instead searching and studying to achieve a great idea, a breakthrough that will earn him the respect and position he feels he deserves.

Eventually he does hit upon an idea relating to game theory and bargaining that is wildly original and wins him an appointment to MIT. Nash hits upon this idea in a bar drinking with his buddies and arguing about a blond. Though A Beautiful Mind can’t get at just how Nash’s mind works successfully throughout the film, the inspiration of the blond is very cleverly staged to demonstrate that Nash’s particular genius was both theoretical and oddly down to earth.

Nash’s work in the field of game theory earns him his own lab at MIT. His two friends Bender (Anthony Rapp) and Sol (Adam Goldberg) go with him to MIT. These two actors played best friends in another, vastly different film, Dazed and Confused, in which they were brainy boys jokingly nicknamed “Woodward” and “Bernstein” by their friend, Pink. The contrast between the two worlds is very amusing, though the roles are amusingly similar.

At MIT, Nash must teach as well as attend to his research. In one of his classes is a young woman named Alicia, who gains his attention by giving him an example of his own theory at work. Akiva Goldsman’s script contains many marvelous moments and scenes, but the meeting between Nash and Alicia is more than a meet cute. She uses principles he is developing theorems about and her considerable loveliness to move a few construction workers. The scene is lightly done, not forcing the point, just dancing over it.

Jennifer Connelly is adorable as Alicia in this first scene. The role of Alicia is as challenging as that of John Nash. Like they used to say about Ginger Rodgers, she did everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in heels. Connelly deserves the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for being able to so gracefully command the many emotions the role demands. Alicia is with her husband through everything they face. Crowe’s performance is also marvelous, except for the sometime accent in the early scenes. Together they are the most remarkable film performances of the year.

Soon after Nash and Alicia marry, after a short but romantic and quirky courtship, Nash’s troubles begin. It isn’t until Nash has a severe breakdown that we understand just what the scale and scope of his illness is and has been. The revelation that the world is not quite what we think it is works too well at getting us inside the mind of someone suffering from a true psychic split.

From this point on, A Beautiful Mind focuses more on the relationship between Nash and Alicia and Nash’s struggle to fight back to recover some measure of mental health. As unsympathetic as the world is to mental illness today, part of the horror of Nash’s struggle is witnessing how painful and minimally effective the treatments of nearly 50 years ago were.

Nash struggles for decades. We see only snippets of his recovery, the key moments in a long battle. But by the early 90s, Nash is in contention for a Nobel prize based on work he did early in his career. A Beautiful Mind covers nearly 50 years. When Nash gives his Nobel acceptance speech, the long hard struggle of his life lives in his words.

A Beautiful Mind makes Nash’s struggle seem much more wonderful and difficult than battling orcs, dwarfs and rings (oh my!). I think it has the edge for Best Picture.