Film review: The Young Karl Marx

After the critical success of his Oscar-nominated documentary about the career and struggles of writer and American civil rights hero James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, Haitian director Raul Peck takes on another iconic political figure  in his new feature film The Young Karl Marx.

Centering on the birth of the Communist movement, and the lifelong friendship between Jewish-born theorist Karl Marx (his parents went on to convert to Christianity shortly after he was born) and Communist Manifesto co-author Friedrich Engels, the film offers a compelling, thorough and surprisingly detailed account of a friendship which spanned decades.

Fleeing an increasingly hostile anti-socialist environment in his native Germany where he was a prolific author of anti-establishment material, Karl Marx (August Diehl) finds himself exiled in Paris where, accompanied by his wife Jenny (played by Phantom Thread star Vicky Krieps), he soon makes a name for himself as a writer.

Dejected by the lack of interest in his more revolutionary ideas, Marx finds an ally in a young compatriot named Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske) whose ideas he finds to be very close to his own. Bonding over similar upbringings and the wish to break away from their bourgeois roots, the two young men hatch a plan for a universal movement which, they hope, will resonate with workers throughout the world and encourage them to overthrow an unjust and cruel feudalist system which only served to benefit the rich.