The extraordinary director Terence Davies pours his heart and soul into this ambitious chronicle of the life of Siegfried Sassoon, whose experiences in the trenches of World War I resulted in some of the greatest anti-war poetry ever written. Jack Lowden plays the idealistic, gay and courageous young Sassoon, whose protest against the slaughter landed him in a mental hospital, where he befriended fellow poet Wilfred Owen and the sympathetic gay psychiatrist Dr. Rivers. We see the uncloseted Sassoon of the ‘20s swept up in high society affairs, most unhappily with the flighty entertainer Ivor Novello. Scrambling chronology, Davies intercuts that vibrant Sassoon with the acerbic and embittered man he became (now played by Peter Capaldi), a desperate convert to Catholicism who has retreated into marriage and fatherhood with a woman who’s well aware of his true desires. Davies’ intimate, heartbreaking epic illuminates the conflicted soul of an artist at war with society and with himself.