In his 1954 autobiography “A Tree Is a Tree,” the pioneering American film director King Vidor recalled a scene from his childhood in Galveston, Texas, around the turn of the 20th century. As a group of his friends energetically took turns diving off of a swimming float, Vidor “saw in the scene music reduced to movement; I felt its rhythm, tempo, beauty, humor; I was aware of form and composition, of line and action. I wanted to record it, to show others what had been shown to me; there must be some way of capturing and preserving what I saw and felt.”

As Agnieszka Holland’s new film “Copying Beethoven” begins, a deadly earnest, attractive young woman impatiently rides cross-country in a horse-drawn carriage. What follows is a sequence of shots and music that had my heart in my mouth even before the credits were over. First-person point of view images of the rural area through which the carriage races mesh and intersect. Sun-dappled trees give way to dew-slick grass, an ephemeral dawn haze is eclipsed by the dark-textured backs of farmers. Color, light, and movement merge in this sequence with transporting clarity.

It’s as if Vidor’s ghost had called “action.” But these images flock together and take flight on the wings of a Beethoven symphony. In this bravura opening sequence, Ms. Holland has turned the tables on Vidor. Using the motion picture camera, she has elevated movement and image to the level of Beethoven’s music.

The sequence ends, the Beethoven piece fades, and the woman in the carriage, Anna Hultz (Diane Kruger) arrives at the bedside of Wenzel Schlemmer, an agent who worked on behalf of Ludwig van himself and is now on the threshold of joining his late client in Baroque and Roll heaven. In short biopic order we plunge backward a decade or two to Vienna in 1824, when Herr Schlemmer still had his health, Beethoven was still alive, and young Anna was a promising conservatory student sent to bail out Schlemmer a few days before the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

In those days there were, of course, no mechanical or photographic means by which to generate all the necessary copies of a symphonic score. Composers like Beethoven relied on copyists, often teams of them, to painstakingly re-render the maestro’s orchestrations into all the necessary arrangements and duplicates. But Beethoven — played with characteristic twinkle eyed and lantern jawed brio by the go-to guy for self-destructive artist icons, Ed Harris — was hell on himself and everyone around him, especially his agent and his copyists. Herr Schlemmer, who’s “been with him since the Seventh”refers to his boss as “the beast.”

Expecting to learn at the elbow of the master, Anna is instead browbeaten, verbally abused, and second-guessed by a deaf old reprobate who insists on logging equal time at the bar, the cat house, and the piano, and living in abject tenement squalor, 19th-century style. What follows is a lively historical fantasy of sorts in which Beethoven’s coarseness reveals personal doubt, his bullying masks a profound un-fulfillable need to be loved, and his sybaritic appetites fill in the spiritually empty gaps between chapters in a lifelong musical conversation with God.

“I’m a very difficult person,” Mr. Harris’s Beethoven bellows,”but I take comfort in the fact that God made me that way!” Anna, it turns out, is no pushover herself. Though safely installed in a Vienna convent by night, she regularly outmaneuvers the mother superior and conducts a romance with Martin (Matthew Goode),a young architect as idealistic as Anna and on the opposite side of the enlightenment fence from Beethoven.

To some extent,”Copying Beethoven” is a feminist historical piece. Rough-hewn, self-torturing teacher learns from pupil, pupil grows beyond her own expectations, and everyone’s the better for it. By tilting the first two thirds of the film toward Beethoven’s debut of the Ninth Symphony “Ode to Joy,”the film also has the energy of a backstage drama that climaxes in triumphant performance.

Terrified that his deafness will keep him from holding his musicians together, Beethoven persuades Anna, the only person who knows the Ninth as intimately as its creator, to prompt him from offstage with her own conducting movements. This sequence is, like the film’s opening, another stunning union of sound and image, albeit with a courageously loony edge. In Ms. Holland’s brilliant mosaic of close-ups and camera movements, Ms. Kruger’s pale, extravagantly long arms form a sort of reverse Venus De Milo — nearly disembodied and somehow telegraphing the Ninth Symphony’s glorious climatic thresholds into the head and body of its composer.

But as the sequence builds to a climax and beyond, credulity fades out with the music. The script for “Copying Beethoven,” by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (who also penned “Ali” and “Nixon”) does an admirable job of parsing out the facts of Beethoven’s life into bite-sized chunks. And in Ms. Holland their writing has a formidable ally. Stripped of Michael Mann’s wide-screen crypto psychedelia, in which backgrounds faded into Milton Avery-esque blobs,”Ali” would not have been a contender. And without Oliver Stone’s hyperventilating camera extravagance, “Nixon” wouldn’t have been half the comic book it was.

But Ms. Holland’s gifts are subtler and more classicist than those of Messrs. Mann and Stone, and can only transform so much. Over the full course of the film, sequences like the opening montage and the Ninth Symphony conductor pas de deux are reduced to stand-alones. Like the amazingly dynamic ballroom scene in Vincente Minnelli’s overripe 1949 adaptation of “Madame Bovary,” these sequences average out into memorable high points in an otherwise marginal movie.

A small amount of post-screening research confirmed that there was in reality no Anna Hultz. Beethoven’s copyists were not gifted woman composers struggling to make their names in a chauvinistic world — they were nearly anonymous men. Having recently rhapsodized on these pages about how Werner Herzog’s script to “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” brazenly turned the facts of history on their ear, I wondered why that none-too-surprising discovery rankled as much as it did.

The real Aguirre was, until Mr. Herzog and Klaus Kinski remade him in their own obsessive images, barely a footnote in history. Beethoven, whether you know him from “A Clockwork Orange,” the top of Schroeder’s piano, or childhood piano lessons, is an icon. Mr. Herzog’s Aguirre is the product of imagination. Though Ms. Kruger, Mr. Harris, and especially Ms. Holland make the most of copying history’s Beethoven and pasting him alongside a beautiful, iron-willed but giving blonde heroine, their story is simply the product of screenwriting formula. Considering the skill of the lead actor and director, they may have achieved equal success had Beethoven been paired with a streetwise orphan, a time traveling cop, an alien bounty hunter, or a clumsy but lovable dog.