When films are being considered about real people or events why not do the obvious thing and make them factual? This thought occurred to me during The Dark Horse, a biopic of Genesis Potini, the Maori chess champion afflicted by bipolar disorder (James Napier Robertson, 2014). Or perhaps that should be chiss champion, this being a story told using Kiwi vowels. I have since found out that a documentary came first, before Plotini’s untimely death, which changes the question slightly. I now wonder how much a fictional approach adds to our understanding – or messes with the truth in the interests of plot, time constraints or ticket sales.

The Dark Horse is on the face of it a fairly straightforward account which follows Plotini’s release from hospital into the care of his brother Akiri, a gang member with troubles of his own. Plotini is soon reduced to sleeping rough and a quick return to the asylum seems likely. Then he discovers a chess club, the Eastern Knights which uses the game to get troubled youngsters off the streets and finds a purpose and means of redemption for himself in helping others. This leads to conflict with Akiri over the latter’s son, Mana, who is scheduled for ‘patching’ or induction into the gang but sees in his uncle’s example a means of escaping that fate.

Influenced no doubt by seeing the hakka performed I have always assumed that New Zealand’s indigenous people avoided the wretchedness inflicted on Australia’s aborigines, but The Dark Horse depicts a more complex and disturbing reality. Adapting uneasily to urban life some Maoris have sought in criminal gangs the sense of belonging and warrior ethos of pre-conquest times, mixing their own mythology with dreadlocks and ghetto-speak, the hallmarks of black defiance elsewhere in the world. They live at the edges of white society, subsisting on petty crime and strung out on drugs and booze. It is rage turned inwards against themselves, a sense of dispossession metastasised as violence and addiction. Akiri’s cancer is both literally and symbolically true.

In a powerful, nuanced performance Cliff Curtis conveys the conflicted qualities of Plotini and his people: troubled and endearing, unstable and brilliant, the tragic and heroic complexly combined. It might be said that in his own career Curtis has enacted the marginalisation of non-western societies, having been called on to play a number of dark-skinned ethnicities not his own: to us, the casting directors seem to say, they all look the same. In returning to his roots, however he does justice not only to the man he brings to the screen but also to the history they both share. In its overcoming of adversity Plotini’s story represents a triumph of the human spirit plus some less fashionable ideas. It is a lesson in how identity can imprison as well as define the individual and, lest we forget, a tribute to medication and thereby to the science with which western civilization seeks to mitigate its bludgeoning of humanity.

That brings me back to the questions I started with. What is gained by dramatising the story, and what might be lost as a result? Of course exposure comes more easily to a feature film than to a documentary: how many of the latter turn up at your local multiplex? This is a matter of regret and a comment on the lack of seriousness in popular culture, reflecting the shallowness of most punters or their manipulation by Hollywood: take your pick. Not that many New Zealand movies go on general release but film festivals offer a means of access to more discerning cinephiles after which it is all down to word of mouth. Thus can a following be built, which in this case would be richly merited.

For the sake of argument, let us assume the public’s preference for story over analysis, for being entertained as opposed to informed is a given which The Dark Horse recognises. What aspects of Plotini’s life are illuminated or demeaned by this approach? In a less intelligent film the trajectory from despair to vindication would have been more predictable, the battle with the demons in Maori culture a platitude pitting the lone hero against one-dimensional villains. As director, Robertson avoids the worst of these pitfalls. There are sufficient dips in the arc to leave the outcome in doubt, enough self-awareness in Akiri and in Mana’s tormentor, Mutt to humanise the forces ranged against the troubled protagonist. At some level these frightening, unhappy men hate what they have become.

Still there are subtleties lost or skated over. Reading up on Plotini’s story I find that he co-founded the Eastern Knights and learned to play chess there. The fact that he knows the people running the club hints at this background and it would have been easy to make the point clear: but for some reason the film says almost nothing about his previous life. This explains why the precise nature of Plotini’s genius is never revealed. In reality, speed chess was his thing, a frenetic form of the game in which players exchange banter as well as pieces. This makes sense given the hyperactive nature of his upbeat moods, and throws light on his interest in the national championships which is fleetingly referred to. Can his medicated temperament adapt to the longer form of the game? Will he be accepted by the white establishment? This hint at insecurity and rehabilitation is never followed up, not the only loose end of an otherwise excellent and thought-provoking film.

Or is that a virtue in any work of art, neatness and completion being foreign to life? The postmodern view of objective truth is that it does not exist, perceptive fiction as capable of insight as fallible fact is of deceit, both versions overlaying each other in a constant process of change and interpretation. And it occurs to me that in its relationship with the documentary of the same name The Dark Horse encapsulates that necessary, binocular view of the world in which the quest to know what happened and to peer beneath the surface of events are different sides of the same coin, one that will always glitter no matter how long it has been in circulation.