I watched this movie because of what a fan I've always been of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Unfortunately, even though it was interesting to see Ian McKellen – who my generation knows only from the Lord of the Rings and X-Men franchises – looking so young, it gave me no more an insight into what kind of man DH Lawrence was than I had before.

The character is sound, and McKellen is as good as you expect as the writer, but the characterisation is all over the place. Is he a troubled genius? A lucky buffoon? A lovelorn romantic or libertine cheat? A curmudgeonly anti-establishmentarian?

Yes and no, both between and within scenes, to the extent you don't know him any more than you did when the film opened. Maybe that was the point of the script by Alan Plater (based on a biography, which was in turn based on Lawrence's own letters and diaries).

Another cause for confusion was the fact that McKellen is listed late in the on-screen credits, usually a signal that the character you most know and who you're most there to see is actually a bit of a foil for what's going on with the people around him, as if the story wasn't going to be any kind of biopic of Lawrence but would be about the affect his work would have on society around him.

When we meet he and German wife Frieda (Janet Suzman) he's already an enemy of polite society (in the form of John Gielgud as a government censor, high in the credits but only appearing in two scenes) and is preparing to leave England thanks to the constant harassment over both his career and his wife's ancestry in the interwar years.

They travel (as they did in life) to New Mexico at the behest of a rich widow (played by Old Hollywood legend Ava Gardner) who wants to give them a ranch and house to live and work in, but like everything else in the movie, everyone's motivations and behaviour around it is incomprehensible.

The Lawrences angrily refuse their benefactor, evidently not wanting to accept charity but agreeing to live them and pay rent in the form of Lawrence's library of writings. Treated like shit by the artists she wanted to nurture, she doesn't in fact tell them to fuck off and starve but for some reason continues a relationship with the pair of them even after they leave.

They then travel to Mexico, where Frieda finally wants to chuck in the itinerant artist's life and have a relationship with the children she abandoned to embark on her relationship with Lawrence, returning to Europe where they somehow manage to live like kings in one luxurious villa overlooking the Mediterranean after another, all while Lawrence plans his magnum opus, originally called Lady C.

Penelope Keith is also hanging around as a deaf painter who might be a patron of the pair or might just be a friend who happens to travel with them, but holds an obvious torch for Lawrence that will end badly, and various other people flit in and out of the story whose presence and part in it I had similarly no idea about. I think some of them were Frieda's grown up daughters, but the character interaction made no more sense between them as it did the major cast.

It looks authentic, but apart from a vague sense of seeing history being made (Lawrence using a Florence printer to publish Lady Chatterley because no British publisher would touch him, for instance) I was bored throughout, waiting for something to make sense.