Sometimes it feels like the growing subset of films set in the stuffy British academic world of the early ’70s deserve a genre all to themselves. It’s a very interesting visual paradox; young people going out into the world to discover and further themselves in an environment that’s been stained nicotine-brown by the chain-smokers of their parents’ generation. Beer comes in heavy pint mugs, to be drunk in “snugs”, at pubs that most people get to and from in rickety death-trap cars almost a decade before seatbelts were made compulsory.

This world is the setting for a real-life road trip taken by American writer Jay Parini (played by Fionn Whitehead), who, in 1971, enrolled at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to fulfil his dream of becoming a poet. Parini is trying to put his old life behind him; on his conscience is the fact that he has inadvertently inspired his younger brother Billy to sign up for service in the Vietnam war. Billy sends him diary-like cassette tapes from the heart of the combat zone that become increasingly bleak, making Parini’s quest to find a mentor — “someone who would help me become a writer” — all the more desperate.

Parini goes through a series of mentors, the first being academic scholar Alistair Reid (Alan Cumming), who agrees to help Parini if he helps his pre-teen son Jasper with tuition in return. Alistair has the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges (Luis Gnecco) coming to stay, but Parini seems oddly unconcerned by the imminent arrival of this master of letters. Instead, Parini is planning, as part of his PhD project, to interview reclusive poet George Mackay Brown (Peter Mullan), who never leaves his hometown in Orkney. In a very plausible exchange, Parini’s tutor is appalled, telling him, “We prefer our poets dead in Scotland,” adding that the aim of the course is “to study writers, not become one.”