While in his 20s, Karl Marx struggles to establish himself as a writer of political and sociological importance. The film begins with a scene where poor people are gathering dead wood in a forest where they have done this for centuries, but the government has made it illegal to collect the wood as it is now legally private property of the landlords. The poor are persecuted and extrajudicially killed by the government officials. Marx wrote about these events and believes that the bourgeois class has taken ownership of the state itself.
Marx meets Friedrich Engels, a young man whose wealthy father owns factories. Engels' belief that the workers there and elsewhere, including children, are mistreated and underpaid matures. The men begin to work together to create a new political movement to reform and unite the impoverished workers. Eventually, the two stage a coup during a meeting of the League of the Just and create the Communist League in its place. The film ends with Marx and Engels publishing select theories, in a simple language for anyone to understand in a relatively short writing known as The Communist Manifesto the same year of the 1848 revolutions.[5]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 63% based on 51 reviews, and an average rating of 6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The Young Karl Marx makes a valiant attempt to make the philosophical cinematic, but lacks sufficient depth to tackle its complex themes."[6] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 62 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[7]
The Guardian's review by Peter Bradshaw gave the film four out of five stars and stated, "It shouldn't work, but it does, due to the intelligence of the acting and the stamina and concentration of the writing and directing."[8] In a review for Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee described the film as "a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man", noting its faithfulness to the historical record.[9] Writing for the New Statesman, Suzanne Moore described the film as "sparky, brave and totally absorbing" and "in many ways a conventional biopic, lifted by its performances, and by its insistence that ideas matter".[10]A.O. Scott of the New York Times regarded it as being "both intellectually serious and engagingly free-spirited."[11]
The film has been released on Blu-ray and DVD in areas of Europe, though these releases are reported to lack English subtitles for extensive passages of dialogue in German or French, and are region-locked. A Region 1 DVD has been released for the North American market which includes English subtitles.
