Review: 'Radioactive' is an illuminating look at Marie Curie, with a powerful performance by Rosamund Pike

How do you tell the story of a well-known historic figure that doesn’t entirely tread over familiar ground or come off like a Wikipedia entry listing by rote one event after another? Having the visual flair of director Marjane Satrapi, and a fiery actor like Rosamund Pike, certainly help in “Radioactive,” an engrossing biography of physicist and chemist Marie Curie.

Pike plays Polish-born Marie Sklodowska, who we meet in Paris in 1893, as she butts heads with the establishment males in charge of the University of Paris — who won’t give her the space or equipment she demands for her research. Instead, she meets Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), one of the few male scientists who takes Marie’s theories seriously, though it takes him some convincing before she’s willing to take up his offer for laboratory space.

Curie carries the determination, some call it arrogance, familiar to anyone who’s seen “Hamilton”; she is the person who assumes she’s the smartest in the room, often because she is. While this angers some men, like the officious Prof. Lippmann (Simon Russell Beale), it intrigues Pierre. Soon enough, Pierre intrigues Marie — and soon after that, they fall in love and marry.

Their partnership in the lab leads them to follow up on Marie’s belief that there’s something in pitchblende, the ore from which uranium is extracted, that gives off more energy than refined uranium. After much effort, nicely compacted into an energetic montage, they discover two new elements, radium and polonium — as well as an energy force emitted by both elements, a force Marie calls “radioactivity.”

Satrapi — best known for creating the graphic-novel memoir “Persepolis,” and co-directing its animated adaptation — and screenwriter Jack Thorne (“The Aeronauts”), often go beyond the usual biopic by intercutting the Curies’ life story with vignettes of what their discovery unleashed on the world. Some things are good, like radiation therapy for cancer; others not so good, such as making the names Hiroshima and Chernobyl the stuff of nightmares.

Thorne, in adapting Lauren Redness’ graphic novel of the Curies’ lives, sometimes resorts to the hoariest screenwriting cliches — like when Pierre coughs into his hankie too many times. But he and Satrapi make up for that by venturing past the familiar territory of Marie’s research and her two Nobel Prizes, to Marie supporting her daughter Irene (Anya Taylor-Joy) in her effort to get X-ray machines to the World War I battlefields to reduce unnecessary amputations.

For all of Satrapi’s visual inventiveness in capturing Marie’s story and its legacy, the MVP of “Radioactive” is Pike, who embodies Marie’s flinty brilliance and her impatience that no one takes it for granted that she’s a genius. She gives “Radioactive” a passion, an energy, that few actors today can match.

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‘Radioactive’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, July 24, streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, brief nudity and a scene of sexuality. Running time: 110 minutes.