Ben Whishaw shines in Campion's 'Bright Star'

CANNES, France — "Bright Star" gives actor Ben Whishaw a chance to shine.

Jane Campion's film about the love affair between poet John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne is a critics' favorite at the Cannes Film Festival and could win Campion a second Palme d'Or to put next to the one she took home in 1993 for "The Piano."

It should also be a breakout role for 28-year-old British actor Whishaw. He is a haunting presence in the quiet, luminous movie as Keats, who wrote some of the best-loved poems in the English language, including "Ode to a Nightingale," and died of tuberculosis at 25.

Keats' poems received a critical drubbing in his lifetime, and before Whishaw got the part he didn't consider himself a fan of the Romantic poet either.

"In Keats's day, the quality of his writing that got up people's noses was that it was so emotional and so sensual and considered to be unmanly because of this emphasis on feeling," Whishaw said in an interview. "I think probably that was what my prejudice was.

"It is hugely emotional work. I learned to love that and embrace it. And of course his greatest poems, like the odes, are really a lot about death as well, and about transience — serious stuff."

With his dark eyes, pale skin and thick black air, Whishaw cuts a striking yet spectral figure in a dim Cannes hotel ballroom. On-screen, his sickly Keats is fragile and vulnerable, but with a resolute core, determined his love should endure even as he senses death is near.

The actor has had starring roles on British TV — he was memorable as a young man imprisoned for murder in the 2008 BBC miniseries "Criminal Justice" — and was an acclaimed stage Hamlet at London's Old Vic when he was just 23.

On the big screen he has played a dissolute aristocrat in "Brideshead Revisited," a scent-obsessed murderer in "Perfume" and one of several versions of Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There."

Bright Star" — the title comes from a Keats sonnet — also stars Australian actress Abbie Cornish ("Somersault," "Stop-Loss") as Brawne, a Regency fashionista who sews her own fabulously colorful clothes. Keats initially finds Fanny annoyingly trivial, but soon recognizes her as a soul mate — to the alarm of both his possessive friend Charles Brown and of her family, alarmed to see Fanny falling for a penniless poet.

Theirs is an intense but largely chaste romance. Constrained by ever-present friends and family, and by the social mores of early 19th-century England, the pair scarcely even kiss.