When the author David Foster Wallace was 34, he visited the Mall of America on the last stop of his book tour. It was 1996, and Wallace had just released, to great acclaim, Infinite Jest. During a meal at the mall’s food court, Wallace describes the Mall as a “tsunami of stuff,” but admits, “it’s not unfun.”

The Mall of America is, in a way, a very David Foster Wallace kind of place. Wallace was equally fascinated and mystified by consumption and American excess. He loved popular movies and TV and fast food but he also wondered what it meant to be the kind of American who loved these things. His visit to the Mall of America, a mix of fascination and indulgence, is captured in the new film The End of the Tour.

I just left the Mall of America, having watched The End of the Tour and attended a Q&A session with the actor Jason Segel, who plays Wallace in the film. Segel referred to his Mall of America return as “the end of the press tour.” The end of spending months thinking almost constantly about David Foster Wallace. He seemed relieved.

A year has passed since the world learned that Jason Segel would play David Foster Wallace. The news was accompanied by great derision. Skeptics questioned whether the comedian, writer and actor best known as Marshall on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, could transition to playing the almost mythic author of Infinite Jest. Segel voiced this concern, fearing that “you all could have just said ‘No, I don’t accept Marshall as David Foster Wallace’.”

Others were worried about director James Ponsoldt. Ponsoldt made the lovely young-adult film Spectacular Now. He’s also a huge Wallace fan (he even had parts of a Wallace speech read aloud at his wedding); it was feared he would make a bland, sanctifying love-letter to Wallace, boosting the myth of the Literary Giant at the expense of the man or a story.

These cinematic worries paled in comparison to the film’s most damning criticism, which comes from Wallace’s family, publisher, and literary trust. They all opposed the very idea of making The End of the Tour. They released a statement last year to “make it clear that they have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support The End of the Tour.”

It’s not hard to understand why Wallace’s friends and family would want to avoid seeing his life depicted in the movies. Wallace struggled with addiction, and worked for decades to manage depression; finally committing suicide in 2008. But he cannot be reduced to those biographical details. Many consider his 1996 novel Infinite Jest to be one of great American novels, and its success started to create the myth of “David Foster Wallace” long before his death. That praise made Wallace uncomfortable-he never wanted to be a public figure or celebrity, and said so (“I don’t mind appearing in Rolling Stone,” he said in 1996. “I don’t want to appear in Rolling Stone as someone who wants to be in Rolling Stone.”) Whatever the intentions of a filmmaker might be, Wallace’s closest companions have every right to worry that his life would be misunderstood or trivialized on film.

What complicates the fears and opposition for Ponsoldt and Segel is that while The End of the Tour is a film portraying David Foster Wallace, the success or failure of the film cannot depend upon “getting David Foster Wallace right.” While that is clearly important to the creators, it’s not really required for making a good film. What Ponsoldt and Segel have to do is tell a moving story and tell it well. Their responsibility is not to treat Wallace with reverence, but to treat this story and its subjects with respect.

Now that The End of the Tour is finally released, we can say that James Ponsoldt has made a fine, sensitive film. Jason Segel and his co-star Jesse Eisenberg both give terrific performances. Opposition to the film remains (and has been the subject of countless editorials and thinkpieces), and likely will forever, but this is a rare success: a very good movie about writing.

Ponsoldt succeeds largely by avoiding the concept of the literary biopic, and telling a story instead about two men on a road-trip, wrestling with talent and genius. Those men are Wallace and the journalist David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg. The film is adapted from Lipky’s 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, which chronicles Lipsky’s five days with Wallace during the final leg of the Infinite Jest book tour. Lipsky was on assignment for Rolling Stone Magazine, and recorded their days’ long conversation.

Segel handles the anxieties of Wallace convincingly, playing him as a man who is self-deprecating, funny, and cautious, while suppressing a well of interior thought. It helps that almost every word Segel says in the film comes from Lipsky’s original interview tapes. One gets the sense that Wallace is constantly on the hunt for the right words, and when he gets them wrong, you can see in Segel the fear Wallace has of letting others “shape the impression of me,” as he puts it.

Eisenberg, fast becoming one of America’s best young actors, plays Lipsky with equal parts affection and jealousy for Wallace. His bashful-little-brother routine lands perfectly in the folds of Wallace’s hulking presence. During a late-night hotel exchange, for example, Lipsky tells Wallace, “My girlfriend likes your writing better than mine, and it’s really annoying.” Wallace then calls Lipsky’s girlfriend, and they talk for 30 minutes.

Ponsoldt, in his direction, provides just enough sentiment in the relationship without overwhelming audiences with outsized personalities. The film works hard to portray Wallace as a man with anxiety and doubt, as well as a writer of genius, and allows Wallace the chance to rebut the already growing myth of Wallace. He refers to the massive success-both commercially and critically-of Infinite Jest as “this whole fuss,” and only minutes later is worrying that he is coming off as a “whore” who is “cashing in,” fearing that he might become the kind of writer who likes talking about writing more than actually writing.

Lipsky and Wallace debate writing, celebrity, pop culture, TV, women. They are friendly, most of the time. But the two men are not friends, or equals. Lipsky had just published a novel of his own, but feels dwarfed by the magnitude of Wallace’s achievements. He views Wallace as the paragon of artistic success, and hopes to befriend the literary Wallace as much as he hopes to provide a good magazine story (a story that was never published). For his part, Wallace sees Lipsky as a guy he enjoys talking to, but who is also a journalist who will take anything Wallace says and manipulate it for the success of an article. Wallace is concerned about how he sounds on the tape recorder, while Lipsky is parsing Wallace’s words for insights into Wallace’s success.

The combative relationship between talent and genius has always made for intriguing cinema, and it’s in that tradition that The End of the Tour does its most potent work. The film has as much in common with Amadeus as it does any literary biopic I’ve ever seen.Wallace talks about being no smarter than his audience, and not assuming anyone has a less rich interior life than himself. He “cherishes his regular guyness,” he says. But Lipsky challenges Wallace on this persona, and it’s hard to dispute Lipsky’s argument: “You don’t pick up a 1,000 page novel because you heard the author is a regular guy. You do it because you think he’s brilliant.”

The unyielding talent of Mozart is an apt allusion for an artist likeWallace, who was a man captured by anxiety and addiction, who struggled to find an intentional, rewarding life. From this experience, he produced work that was the envy of his peers.

About Wallace, Lipsky was right. The author was brilliant. But he was not only brilliant. He was also lonely, and a good teacher, and funny. When he offered breakfast to reporters, he said things like “mi poptart es su poptart.” He loved his dogs, and in the years after this film, his wife. He was the guy who, when he had a free afternoon to spend in the Twin Cities, wanted to go the Mall of America, see a bad movie (they see Broken Arrow, a terrible John Travolta action film), and discuss the complexities of America’s addictive consumerism, before going home and sitting alone in a room with a sheet of paper.

The End of the Tour opens today in Minneapolis at the Uptown Theater.

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