The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan has long been a hero in the mathematical community, but he remains mostly unknown outside the field. A new film aims to change that. The Man Who Knew Infinity is based on a 1991 book by Robert Kanigel and spans an eight-year period of Ramanujan’s life, beginning in 1912 with his time as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust in India and following him to Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, where he was invited to work with the British mathematician G H Hardy.

The initial scenes in Madras (now Chennai) are rather slow and the dialogue between the main characters – Ramanujan (played by Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame), his wife, his mother and his employer – seems awkward and stilted. The action picks up once Ramanujan is in Cambridge, where he has to navigate a myriad of social and academic nuances, and where he frequently struggles with his snooty and often racist colleagues. He is sometimes at odds even with his mentor Hardy (played by Jeremy Irons), who tries his best to teach this overly confident genius the necessity and value of proving his mathematical insights. Much of this is historically accurate, at least within the bounds of Hollywood storytelling (the fact that Ramanujan’s wife was about 12 years old when they began living together goes unmentioned). However, the film ignores the fact that although Ramanujan was relatively untaught and did not have a degree, he had published some of his work in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society and received recognition for his mathematical prowess in Chennai before he left for Europe.

Such lapses reveal the limitations of the “lone scientific genius” film genre, which has become rather prescriptive: take one young, clever but socially awkward (male) scientist; mix in some complicated equations (ideally written in sand or sketched upon a window); add a partner (often quickly forgotten) to humanize the aforementioned scientist; set all this against the backdrop of a life spent battling against the odds, and voilà, you have a winner. Still, one hopes The Man who Knew Infinity will help Ramanujan join his “lone scientific genius biopic” comrades (John Nash, Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, et al.) in the scientific hall of fame. He certainly deserves it.

• 2016 Edward R Pressman Film/ Zeitgeist Entertainment Group/ Animus Films/ Kreo Films FZ