Although handsomely made and admirably performed, The Danish Girl doesn’t quite become the emotionally powerfully and socially important picture it clearly hoped to be.

One thing that is during awards season is that narrative plays as important (or perhaps even more so) a role as quality in determining who wins what. 2015 was supposed to be the year LGBT themed movies dominated the water cooler and win all the acclaim. Yet with Freeheld free falling upon release, Carol not getting the Oscar love it had hoped for, and a slew of other independents failing to gain any momentum, all eyes fell on Tobe Hooper’s The Danish Girl to go for the top prize. It gets a “nice effort” ribbon instead.

The elements are there for something great. Based loosely on the true life story of transgender Danish painter Einar Wegener’s sex-change transition into Lili Elbe (one of the world’s first) and the effect it had on Elbe’s wife, portrait artist Gerner Wegener, The Danish Girl is a film that hits all of its period details to sublime effect, with excellent set (Kristy Parnham, Michael Standish), costume (Paco Delgado) and production design (Eve Stewart), transforming the several European filming locales into 1920s Copenhagen. Director Tobe Hooper relishes such detail, as evident in his Oscar winning work on The King’s Speech and the immersive musical spectacular Les Miserables.

With The Danish Girl it’s the performances that prove to be the most memorable element, for reasons good and bad. Hooper has a midas touch with his actors, yet his inability to provide an emotionally potent story doesn’t help matters. Perhaps it has to do with the unconventional nature of the relationship, yet The Danish Girl never quite pulls at the heart strings nor elicits much in the way of reaction towards the external social factors surrounding this (then) situation.

The Danish Girl succeeds with the intimate story at play between its two leads, who mostly deliver…somewhat. Eddie Redmayne takes to the external and internal plight of Lili’s transformation with perhaps a little too much zeal, the ticks and awkward demeanour conveying more performance than a naturalism with the role. There also can’t help but be comparison made with Redmayne’s previous turn as Stephen Hawking in Theory of Everything, especially in regards to the transformative physical aspect being on key but the emotional side somewhat awkward.

Much like Theory of Everything, it’s the less “showy” female co-lead that delivers the better performance, with Alicia Vikander hitting those emotive beats (both restrained and fiery) to devastating effect, as her character slowly loses the man she fell in love with. It caps a prolific year for Vikander in stellar fashion.

As such, it ponders the question: Which “Danish Girl” is the title referring to?  If the answer is Vikander’s Gerner, then Hooper and co. have failed in their mission statement. But as failures go, The Danish Girl is quite a good one.