Famed physicist Stephen Hawking is the focus of a new biopic that opens Friday in U.S. theaters, but the work on black holes that made him one of the leading scientists of his generation isn't the star.

Instead, The Theory of Everything focuses on the life of Hawking, 72, now almost totally paralyzed from motor neuron disease, and the collapse of his marriage to his first wife, Jane Wilde. It's an approach that has led some science-minded folks to knock the film in advance.

But movies have always preferred to look at people over the knocking together of equations, says the film's Oscar-winning director, James Marsh, who already is being mentioned as a possible contender