‘Mr. Burton’ is an origins story involving one of Wales’ greatest exports – the actor Richard Burton – whose lowly origins were sublimated and rechannelled into his status as one of the world’s most renowned actors of stage and screen. It has a specific remit, covering the period during the Second World War in which the teenage Burton – at that time, Richard Jenkins, son of a drunken miner – came under the tutelage of local schoolteacher in his native Port Talbot Philip Burton (Toby Jones) who, Pygmalion-style, tutored and refined him, getting him, through elocution lessons, to lose any vestiges of his strong regional Welsh accent so that he would be fit for both Oxford and the stage, whose elitist way of thinking would have caused them to disapprove of the more unrefined and uncouth Jenkins (Harry Lawtey) whom we first meet.

By the end, Burton is an acting legend, yet this is more than a rags to riches tale as we see Burton no longer able to completely break free from his background, with a penchant for drinking which emulates the behaviour of his biological father whose lack of ambition and a disinterest in the welfare of his large offspring was one of the first obstacles the young Jenkins needed to surmount if he was to escape the pits. The overarching lesson is of how if one has a talent then they need to have it harnessed, and that Richard Burton would never have existed if his mentor had not adopted him, an act which, while necessary, also raised suspicions in the small community that Philip Burton had an improper motivation for wanting to extricate his protégé from his own family.

This is a substantial film, with a two hour running time, and it has a distinct focus and agenda in the way that it is keen to immerse us in the world of the young Richard Jenkins and how very different it is from the screen Richard Burton whom we saw in later decades. It is a very different sort of origins story to that found in the Marvel or DC canon, but it is no less effective for the way that it seeks to show why and how there can often be a deep-seated need to become somebody other than their birth name – literally in the case of Richard Burton – and that if his talent had not been nurtured he would never have escaped the South Wales valley community which formed and alienated him in equal measure.