General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Set Fire to the Stars

Set Fire to the Stars is a 2014 British black-and-white drama directed by Andy Goddard, his feature debut, about the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's first tour of the United States in 1950. Elijah Wood plays John Malcolm Brinnin, the New York academic who brought Thomas to America, and Celyn Jones, who co-wrote the screenplay with Goddard, plays Thomas.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Andy Goddard (feature debut); written by Goddard and Celyn Jones²
Lead cast	Elijah Wood as John Malcolm Brinnin; Celyn Jones as Dylan Thomas; Kelly Reilly as Caitlin; Shirley Henderson as Shirley¹
Basis	Brinnin's account of Thomas's first visit to New York in 1950, drawn from his 1956 memoir Dylan Thomas in America³
Release	World premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 23 June 2014; UK release 7 November 2014; US release 12 June 2015⁴
Production	Shot entirely on location in Swansea, Wales, over 18 days; produced by Mad As Birds and Masnomis⁵^•⁶
Score	Original music by Gruff Rhys, lead singer of the Super Furry Animals²
Recognition	Nominated in 7 categories at the 2015 BAFTA Cymru Awards, including Best Feature and Best Writer⁷

Spoilers

Story and basis

The film dramatizes the opening of Thomas's 1950 American reading tour. Brinnin, director of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in New York, invites the acclaimed but notorious poet to New York for a series of readings, and then struggles to keep his unruly guest presentable.⁸^•⁹ In the face of Thomas's excesses, Brinnin takes him to a family retreat in the woods of Connecticut to prepare him for the tour, and the week that follows changes his life.¹ The Seattle International Film Festival guide describes the setup as a young poetry professor assigned to accompany Thomas on his first American tour, with a letter from Dylan's wife sending the poet into a spiral of self-destruction.¹⁰

The plot follows Dylan Thomas in America, Brinnin's 1956 memoir, and hinges on whether Brinnin can keep Thomas sober long enough to perform before an Ivy League audience at Yale.³ Director Goddard said some events of that first week were recorded in history, including a ghost-story session with writer Shirley Jackson and her husband and watching boxing, while the filmmakers filled the unrecorded stretches; he compared Thomas and Brinnin to a boxer and his trainer, building the poet up for the tour away from his vices.¹¹

Production

A Welsh shoot for an American story. Although the film is set in New York and Connecticut, it was shot entirely on location in Swansea, Wales, over 18 days.⁵^•¹¹ Jones described it as shot in eighteen days on a low budget, and in a later interview recalled it as made for half a million pounds, with every penny raised by the filmmakers themselves; IMDb lists an estimated budget of £700,000.¹²^•¹³^•⁵ Wood read the script in November 2013, filming began in Wales in January 2014, and he took on co-producer duties independently of his own company SpectreVision.¹⁴

The film was a Mad As Birds Films presentation, produced by Andy Evans and Andrew Riach, with Steve Clark-Hall as executive producer, and was co-funded by Ffilm Cymru Wales.²^•⁶ Making it required founding the production company Mad As Birds, whose name also comes from Thomas's poem Love in the Asylum; the company went on to produce further features including The Vanishing, Poms, and Six Minutes to Midnight.¹³^•¹⁵

Title, style, and music

The title comes from a line in Thomas's poem Love in the Asylum: "I may without fail / Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars," which characters recite through the film.¹¹^•¹⁶ Goddard shot the film in black and white in a 2.35:1 format, a style the distributor's synopsis calls part literary biopic and part love-letter to the American B-movies of the Forties and Fifties.¹^•¹⁷ Every piece of music in the film was original, composed by Gruff Rhys, even down to what plays on the radio within scenes.¹⁵

Release and reception

The film premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 23 June 2014, timed to the centenary of Thomas's birth in October 1914, and was nominated for the festival's Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature.⁴^•¹⁸ It opened in UK cinemas on 7 November 2014 and in the United States on 12 June 2015, distributed by Strand Releasing.⁴^•¹

Critical response was mixed but generally favorable to the performances. The distributor cites four-star notices from Hey U Guys and Seensome, a "black & white masterpiece" verdict from I.D. Magazine, and novelist William Boyd's "Brilliant, subtle, compelling!"¹ Mark Kermode, the Observer's film critic, called it a slight but diverting tale carried by Jones's boisterously rotund performance, praising a late-night Connecticut ghost-story scene with Shirley Henderson while judging that the film never captures the unruly power of its subject.⁹ Little White Lies called it an affectionate, unconventional portrait and a novel take on the biopic format.¹⁶ Aggregated scores were middling: a Metascore of 49 and an IMDb rating of 5.8 from about 1,500 users.⁵

At the 2015 BAFTA Cymru Awards the film received nominations in 7 categories, including Best Feature, Best Actor for Jones, Best Score, and Best Editing, and it won 4 awards at the 2016 London Unrestricted View Film Festival, including Best Feature and Best Actor for Jones.⁷ Its US and Canada gross was $4,280 against the estimated budget.⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026