This intensely personal biographical recreation of the early years of struggle endured by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch is considered by many to be the most successful portrayal of the artistic process ever depicted on film. Munch, crucified by critics and public alike in the late nineteenth century, is seen here as a young man in battle with puritanical Norwegian society and beset with various family tragedies and resultant depressions, all the while wrestling to give expression to his own artistic voice. Hailed by Ingmar Bergman as "a work of genius," Watkins’s portrait speaks not only to a specific creator and his milieu but to the filmmaker’s own artistic enterprise and to intricate issues of contemporary life.