The theme of the movie is teamwork and the submerging of the self. It’s extra concerning the boat than the boys in it, in different phrases, not less than in the event you imagine the rhapsodic screenplay, which refers to rowing as “more poetry than sport.” But the movie does concentrate on one athlete particularly: Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who helps information the racing shell (and the movie) throughout the end line, after being launched to us as a homeless pupil, sleeping in a automotive and with holes in his sneakers, who solely joins the crew as a result of it comes with a mattress and a paycheck.

The poetry is typically pretty, as when Joe is having a disaster of confidence — manifested by his being out of sync together with his teammates — and is changed within the boat by his no-guff coach, Al Ulbrickson (properly performed by Joel Edgerton). In a pivotal scene throughout his exile, Joe visits George Pocock (Peter Guinness), an acclaimed designer and builder of racing shells on the faculty, who waxes lyrical/metaphysical to Joe as they, and Ruhe’s digicam, gaze in rapturous surprise at what odd mortals would possibly mistake for a ship. When all eight males are working in concord, George tells Joe, they grow to be inseparable from the racing shell: Their “sweat and pain bleed into the grain as they become one magical thing that moves across the water like it was born to be nowhere else.”

That’s a pleasant line, if considerably “Karate Kid”-like in its mysticism. (Alternate translation: There isn’t any “I” in “team.”)

There’s isn’t a lot else to complain about. The performing is stable, significantly by Hadley Robinson as Joe’s love curiosity, Joyce, and Luke Slattery as Bobby Moch, who because the crew’s coxswain doesn’t raise an oar however is answerable for navigation and steering. He’s one other sort of coach, if you’ll, extra integral to the crew’s success than it would seem.

Clooney performs that position right here, coaxing performances from his solid that belie the overly acquainted materials, and crafting a story that manages to evoke extra suspense than it has any proper to, even for many who already know the end result.

It’s Oscar season, and “The Boys in the Boat” is a handsome, engrossing, true story, superficially very like the 1981 best-picture winner “Chariots of Fire,” however with out that Olympic drama’s themes of antisemitism and religion. If “The Boys in the Boat” is lacking one thing, it’s substance. And as Al lectures his rowers, nevertheless prettily you carry out, “they don’t give gold medals for style.”

PG-13. Dec. 25 at space theaters. Contains robust language and smoking. 124 minutes.