Biographical pictures are perhaps the most consistently awkward movies in existence. No director (or screenwriter) seems to have figured out how to keep the important details without losing a good sense of pacing, and really, how do you end a biographical movie when the subject is not yet dead? Where's the drop-off point, and why?

These minor complaints aside, A Beautiful Mind, the new film from Ron Howard, is a solid picture with some of the best performances of the year. Best Actor and Actress nominations are going to follow this film like groupies on a rock star.

A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash (Russell Crowe), a brilliant mathematician who rose to prominence in the late 1940's while a graduate student at Princeton. Like many geniuses, Nash is a recluse, better at alienating people then associating with them. This is played out in an especially memorable scene where, attempting to hit on a pretty blonde at a bar, he tells her he wants to exchange as few words as possible, "and get to the intercourse." What is doubly interesting is that nash seems to get a certain glee from his arrogance and insufferable attitude, as if choosing to make fun of a world that he knows he can't ever fully join.

Nash is a rebel from the beginning. He refuses to go to classes, makes a habit of staying days at a time in the library (with his shoes off, a nice touch), and absolutely will not write a paper that is not 100% his own original ideas. Inspiration hits (in a rather creatively directed sequence), and Nash works for days solid on a theory that, I'm told, revolutionized economic theory. The paper secures him a research/teacher gig at his beloved Princeton, and it is here, finally, that the movie really begins to take shape.

Two people arrive in John's life: a shady Man in Black who apparently works for the Department of Defense (Ed Harris), and a graduate student named Alicia, possessed of enough unconventional thinking to attract Nash rather than repulse him. It probably doesn't hurt that she looks like Jennifer Connelly, either.

The MIB has Nash cracking codes for the Department, searching for patterns and communicades encrypted by Russian spies into headlines and articles in Time Magazine, the New York Times, and many other prominent publications. His work is strictly confidential, and kept entirely secret from Alicia , the one woman who takes Nash's oddities in stride because she sees the man inside.

Romance moves at an uncomfortably paced clip, and some indeterminate time later Nash proposes marriage (successfully) to Alicia, and before long Alicia is pregnant with his child. It is then that the bomb drops on Nash: Harris's MIB, and a few other major instances besides, are hallucinations. Paranoid schizophrenia has been growing in his mind since his graduate studies at Princeton, and in a harrowing chain of events, Nash is committed to a psychiatric ward and administered insulin shock therapy, five days a week for ten weeks.

The movie and its characters hit their stride when mental illness takes the forefront of the story. In films (and indeed in most popular fiction), mental illness is a convenient excuse, a character quirk, or a totally overblown straitjacket affair. Not so in A Beautiful Mind. Presented with the hard truth of schizophrenia (that there is no cure, that nobody knows what truly causes it, that a victim will live with it until their dying day), the heartbreaking turns of both Crowe and Connelly give us true insight into what it's like to live with an unstoppable mental affliction. Even though Nash is at times outright dangerous to the health and safety of his family, Alicia never leaves his side. What the movie gives us is a rare married couple that goes beyond "Cute" (the usual Hollywood aspiration) and into a fully functioning unit, what we imagine most successful marriages to truly be like. Alicia wavers but never breaks in the face of Nash's sometimes infuriating illness, and for a long stretch of time A Beautiful Mind makes a surprising shift: the controls pass from Nash to his wife, and her strength of character is as clearly defined as Nash's.

Indeed, it is the leads that turn what would be an above-average film into something truly captivating. Crowe, so solid and sympathetic in tough-guy roles (ala Gladiator and L.A. Confidential), proves he is just as skilled at submerging into a character who is eccentric, troubled, and at times downright meek. He never once wavers in his performance, and the nearly 50 years he ages in the film are performed seamlessly, and utterly convincingly. He is a true and consummate actor, already with enough range in his credits to go down as a Hollywood legend.

And then there's Jennifer Connelly. The movie would fall flat on its face without a strong actress inhabiting the role of Alicia, and Connelly is just such an actress. Her grit, her determination from her first scene to the very end, is the spine and willpower that Nash sometimes needs to move forward and face seemingly insurmountable odds. Connelly has had roles in many innovative and overlooked films (the Academy's dismissal of Requiem for a Dream is nothing short of travesty), but now that she's strutted her stuff in a film by a heavy-hitter like Opie, we have her breakthrough. No more bit parts and ignored films. Ladies and gentlemen, Jennifer Connelly has arrived, and you're no longer allowed to ignore her.

A Beautiful Mind is an achievement; in Hollywood's portrayal of mental illness, in the caliber of its performances, in stark realism paired seamlessly with touching sentiment. The film is at points a bit grim, but the subtle humor of Nash keeps the pace alive, and entertaining. It is a movie that rarely stumbles, and always keeps us in. I'd suggest you bring a hanky or two.