During awards season, it’s not that unusual to see a film about an intellectual, such as A Beautiful Mind or The Theory of Everything, but unfortunately these films all too often use an academic setting as a reassuring signifier of prestige overlaid on otherwise ordinary storyline of overcoming obstacles, overlooking the rather obvious fact that what is most interesting about intellectuals are their ideas. This simple fact is what makes Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter such a refreshing outlier among the staid biopic genre; instead of getting bogged down in biographical details, it tells its subject’s story by animating the ideas that obsessed him and the moral burden he bore for his findings.

The subject is Dr. Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), the social psychologist who became notorious for his 1961 obedience study, one of the most famous experiments of all time. Almereyda opens the film in the disguised Yale laboratory where the study took place and immediately ratchets up the tension. Two men enter, though one is secretly part of the study while the real subject is coerced into administering electric shocks to the other, for no more compelling reason than being told to do so by an authority figure. With screams coming from the next room, the subjects would look uneasily at the men in grey coats that nod impassively and tell them, “You must continue.” Milgram looks on from behind a false mirror, his expression revealing not shock or horror, but simply sad resignation at this weakness of human nature.

Milgram obsessed over the question of human’s obedience to malevolent authority in large part because, as a son of Jewish refugees of the Third Reich, he needed desperately to understand how an atrocity such as the Holocaust was possible and if it could happen again. To his dismay, and the dismay of the public at large, he found that Americans were just as susceptible as Germans to the will of authority. Milgram eventually moved on from his landmark studies, but it cast a long shadow over the rest of his life, which Almereyda mimics by periodically returning to Yale even after Milgram’s life moves forward. Almereyda gives the broad strokes of Milgram’s life – meeting his wife and partner, Sasha (Winona Ryder), navigating academic politics, concocting other famous experiments such as the “six degrees of separation” experiment. But Almereyda always gives the audience a remove from these events, using stagy techniques such as rear projections to keep the tone intellectual rather than emotional. He doesn’t seek to involve the audience in the minutia of Milgram’s life, only the overarching moral questions that Milgram wrestled with his entire life. Sarsgaard a strong, yet understated performance, rarely even raising his voice, but using his eyes and face to convey Milgram’s personality – wise, world-weary, a man who couldn’t help but look behind the curtain to the darker parts of the human condition.