Parts of the film are so good that it’s a shame it strikes so many false notes.

It frequently seems that what the movie ultimately wants from Samuel Beckett is for him not to have been…well, Samuel Beckett.

“Dance First,” a Beckett biopic from James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”), offers simple explanations for the career of a writer whose output famously resists explaining.

Dance First is a tragicomedy, an absurdist meditation on the artist’s search for meaning and failure to find any.