In this absorbing origin story of the Welsh star, Richard Jenkins begins as a wild schoolboy, with a neglectful, alcoholic father. Philip Burton, his inspirational English teacher, sees the potential in him and pours his own frustrated dreams of an acting career into Richard, coaching him in acting and even making him his legal ward and getting him to change his surname to Burton to facilitate the teacher’s sponsorship of his Oxford scholarship. A uniquely painful and dysfunctional story, it shows how Burton’s pride always coexisted with shame and self-hate.
