Revered Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is rendered a colorful, quirky agent to a young writer’s creative and romantic awakening in Marc Turteltaub’s amiable, loosely biographical film.

American author Jay Parini’s 2020 memoir “Borges and Me: An Encounter” read as a charming extension of an anecdote any writer would dine out on for the rest of their life: the tale of how Parini, as a college student in the 1970s, was somehow partnered on a winding road trip through the Scottish Highlands with the venerable Argentine literary icon Jorge Luis Borges. Like any good anecdote, it feels healthily embellished — Borges was doubtless a character, but is fashioned on the page into a Character — in ways that director Marc Turtletaub‘s enjoyable, good-natured screen adaptation appears to build upon. As a feature film, “Borges and Me” is perhaps extended beyond its natural capacity: It feels both a tall story and a thin one. But the charm is still there.

Benefiting considerably from the tawny, textured splendor of its Scottish locations — shot with dewy autumnal crispness by DP Christopher Norr — this is mellow, quietly sentimental fare that was ideally suited to its home-turf world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It will likely please plenty more crowds on the festival circuit en route to global arthouse-crossover distribution, assisted by the mixture of British, South American and North American drawcards in a transatlantic co-production. Those include its deliberately mismatched leads: Chilean veteran Luis Gnecco (“Neruda”) as the twinkly genius, and Fionn Whitehead (“Dunkirk”), an actor eternally English in his uprightness but appealingly cast an Anglophile American, as his exasperated minder.