Two creative idols come crashing down to earth for the price of one in Jane Campion’s painfully anaemic John Keats biopic Bright Star. Here the 19th-century Romantic poet, a vital aesthetic touchstone for all debates about transient life versus immortal art, is reduced to a whimpering scribbler with a bad cough. While the Oscar-winning Campion (The Piano), a director who has never shot a foot of wasted film, has made a movie that plays like a second-rate Merchant and Ivory breast-beater.

Set mostly in Hampstead between 1818 and 1821, the drama focuses on the short-but-doomed and extremely chaste love affair between Keats (Ben Whishaw, mostly doing his best “I’m composing a poem now” face) and his highly spirited next-door neighbour Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). This role — as a woman whose love is scorned by society — is wearily familiar and requires much flushing of cheeks and swishing of skirts from Cornish. .

Worse still, the movie is dramatically inert. In a game attempt to capture the sounds and sights of Hampstead society (a bit of butterfly collecting here, some sewing there) Campion has forgotten to tend to the central romance, and especially to Whishaw’s willowy Keats. Thus, without major tension, conflict or crisis, Brawne and Keats simply mope about, moon at each other, talk about literature and wait for the great poet to die from tuberculosis.

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