Minor flaws & a couple larger ones, but true in spirit

Rating: 8/10 (26 September 2015)

I'm a chess master who grew up playing the game during the "Fischer boom" of the early 1970s, so I know Bobby's story well. This movie had an accurate ratio of genius to madness, and Tobey Maguire and Liev Schreiber gave worthy portrayals of Fischer and Spassky.
Too many chess bits were nonsensical. Some examples:
*Bobby playing a couple of absurd moves on the board while copying a master game from a book
*Bobby plotting which defense to play with the black pieces in his first-ever game against Spassky, but then being shown playing the white pieces
*his second, Bill Lombardy, saying Bobby wasn't playing his usual Sicilian Opening in a game where Bobby had the white pieces, when the Sicilian Defense is an opening that black plays
*Bobby making a move on the board when that move had already been shown on the TV feed.
The moves from the Fischer-Spassky match were generally correct, though Bobby didn't resign game 1 until more moves had been made than were shown in the movie.
My biggest quibbles with the movie, though, concern two major influences on Fischer's career. One, the priest (and chess grandmaster) Bill Lombardy, is very different in real life from the way Peter Sarsgaard portrayed him. Rather than a slim, sharply groomed, drily philosophical figure, the real Lombardy is and was a beefier, more unkempt, more plainly spoken common-man type. This difference reminded me of how Ben Kingsley, in the film _Searching for Bobby Fischer_, played chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini as a stern, acerbic authority figure rather than the warm and humorous guy Bruce really is.
The second influence is not misportrayed, but left out altogether. How can a film on Bobby Fischer not mention his long-time chess teacher Jack Collins, who turned young Bobby's primitive but promising chess style into a well-honed weapon (and did the same for Lombardy and some other leading masters of that era)? I know a movie can't include everything, but Collins was the greatest contributor to Fischer's meteoric rise.
I give the movie makers credit for providing insights into Bobby's complex persona - and for refraining from pandering by showing more real footage of the crazed older Fischer at the film's end. A little more attention to chess accuracy, and the inclusion of a realer Lombardy and the unjustly neglected Collins, would have considerably polished this rough gem.