With this summer's blockbuster returning Wonder Woman to the greatest relevance she's had in at least forty years, what better time than now to learn about her creator in biopic form? Professor Marston and the Wonder Women tells the story of the DC Comics superhero's creator William Moulton Marston and the two women in his life that inspired the character. Part of it evokes films like Finding Neverland and Saving Mr. Banks. But it's more than just a creator finding inspiration and it's not just another tale of creativity overcoming obstacles.

Written and directed by Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.), who picks up her first theatrical credit since 2005's Herbie: Fully Loaded, Professor Marston bounces between 1928 and 1945. In the former, Marston (Luke Evans) is a professor at Harvard's all-female Radcliffe College. He teaches the trailblazing coeds about the DISC model of behaviors: dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. Meanwhile, his educated wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) helps out. Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), a bright and attractive student, threatens to come between them when she is picked as the professor's intern.

Instead, both Marston and his neurotic wife find themselves attracted to the young blonde, who is engaged to a man. The unconventional polyamorous relationship born out of this two-directional love triangle is one focus of the film. In 1945, Marston is asked to defend his depictions of bondage and such in youth-oriented comics by Josette Frank (Connie Britton). Along the way, the Marstons also develop the lie detector, but do not patent it or profit off it.

For centering on the introduction of the star of the summer's best-attended and most unanimously acclaimed films, Professor Marston is surprisingly not a safe or mainstream biography. It's rated R for language and some sex and Robinson, whose debut film was an espionage action-comedy that tackled lesbianism, does not shy from the kinky aspects of Marston's life that you assume would have precluded him from creating one of the most iconic superheroes of all time.

Some of it feels like a stretch to fit biopic mold, like Marston having to defend his work or watch sadly as children gleefully burn his comics in a bonfire. The end credits' photographs of the real parties reveal even though this is an independent film hailing from Megan Ellison's praiseworthy Annapurna Pictures, it's Hollywood as hell at least in casting 38-year-old Evans as Marston and doing nothing to age him into his fifties.

Though it's opening in fall and kind of fits the notion of a prestige movie, Professor Marston is way too minor and ineffective to feature anywhere but on the fringes of Hollywood's award season.