It's not the best imaginable performance of Hawking that could be given (according to most who have seen it - I have not - it adds nothing that Benedict Cumberbatch didn't already do in the 2004 television movie Hawking ), it's more than this rickety display of shallow humanism requires.
There is much biographical crossover between the 2004 BBC TV film Hawking (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Hawking) and this grander, more photogenic adaptation of his first wife Jane's memoir.