Jay Parini arrives at St Andrews in 1971 carrying the kind of ambition that has no practical shape yet. He wants to become a poet, which his academic surroundings regard with roughly the same enthusiasm they might reserve for an unexploded shell. His supervisor, Alastair Reid, prefers scholarship to aspiration. Parini, meanwhile, is haunted by cassette recordings from his younger brother Billy, serving in Vietnam after a decision Parini fears he helped encourage. Then Jorge Luis Borges enters his life.

Marc Turtletaub’s Borges and Me, adapted from Parini’s embellished memoir, understands the strange imbalance of this encounter. Parini barely appreciates the literary giant placed in his care. Borges, 72 and blind, depends upon this uncertain young man to move through Scotland. One is searching desperately for someone who can teach him how to become a writer. The other has already become so thoroughly identified with writing that separating the man from the reputation has grown difficult.

Luis Gnecco plays Borges as someone perpetually halfway between sage and troublesome child. He tells the nervous Parini to speak louder because he is blind, licks the leather binding of an Encyclopedia Britannica because some books ought to be tasted, then urinates outside while his unwilling companion suffers the social consequences. Gnecco gives each act a faint ceremonial quality, as though Borges has spent decades learning how eccentricity can become its own language.