Bradley Cooper has the wolfish grin and raffish charm of a cardsharp — or a baby hedge-fund manager. So at first you may find him a tough sell as a writer of prose so sensitive and “interior” that even an admiring old-school editor tells him it’s unpublishable.
Hold on, though. The writer has moral flaws, and a name, Rory Jansen, that’s better suited to a designer of racy swimwear than a crafter of lambent sentences about the inner workings of the psyche.
Rory’s wise old dad (J.K. Simmons), who writes the checks that keep Rory at his desk, cautions him to know his limitations. But The Words is an all-American story made in Hollywood — the earnest Big Ideas debut of screenwriters Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, who earlier worked on Tron: Legacy. They’re fans of Ernest Hemingway and John Fante, tragic titans of literature who, directly and indirectly, push their way into the action. So it’s not limitations that are on the table so much as the recognition of genius, and that’s where Rory’s troubles begin.
Rory and his wife, Dora (Zoe Saldana, struggling to breathe life into a character who’s little more than a full-service cheerleader), are convinced that greatness seethes within him. In a battered old briefcase picked up by his wife in Paris, Rory finds the manuscript of an enthralling tale penned long ago by a young writer about his sacrifice of the woman he loved for his art.
Frustrated by his own failure to publish, Rory passes off this story as his own. A glitzy new-school editor (Zeljko Ivanek) pounces on it; success follows, along with the literary high life Rory has dreamed of (Amazon, Charlie Rose, black-tie award dinners, the works). The glory is tempered only by the occasional quick twinge of existential unease.