"This is not a film about 'getting well,' " director Scott Hicks says of "Shine," his harrowing but ultimately ennobling study of a child prodigy grown into disturbed manhood. "It's a film about learning to cope -- with the world, with one's past, with genius."

"Shine," which opens in Washington on Christmas Day, was inspired by the story of David Helfgott, an Australian pianist now in his fifties. Raised by an overbearing and abusive father, Helfgott showed enormous talent as a boy and found his way to England, where he studied at the Royal College of Music in London and won a prestigious competition playing the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 (notorious among pianists as perhaps the most physically demanding work in the repertory).

John Gielgud and Noah Taylor in "Shine," the story of piano prodigy David Helfgott.

Almost immediately thereafter, however, Helfgott suffered a complete breakdown, for which he was hospitalized, babbling and incontinent, and from which he has only recently emerged -- playing first to surprised patrons in an Australian wine bar and then gradually resuming a limited concert career.

In Helfgott's case, that famous "thin line between genius and madness" would seem to have been effaced completely, at least for a while. Actor Geoffrey Rush met with Helfgott before playing him as an adult in "Shine" (two other actors, Alex Rafalowicz and Noah Taylor, represent the pianist as a boy and as a young man, respectively). "I was struck by the extraordinary dichotomy between David's incredible focus and control when he was at the piano and the quicksilver, fractured quality of his speech," Rush said during a recent visit to Washington. "On some level, it was as if he were two different people.

"What happens so often with prodigies is that they develop one facet of their personalities to such an extreme degree that all their energy is sunk into that, and then they never really grow up," Hicks added. "They do one thing extraordinarily well, at the expense of everything else."

That's quite a cost -- and the list of musical prodigies who have had difficult passages to adulthood is a long one. Some never made it at all. The Polish violinist Josef Hassid (1923-1950) is remembered for nine near-miraculous 78-rpm recordings -- a little more than half an hour's worth of music -- that he made as a teenager in 1939 and 1940, and that have ensured his legend. Let the English record producer Bryan Crimp finish the story: "Before the end of what should have been a momentous year [1940] the boy had become seriously ill, falling prey to bouts of memory loss, becoming sullen and withdrawn, and often turning against his father and his violin. Acute schizophrenia was diagnosed. After an initial spell in hospital, his condition improved though he had to be readmitted in the summer of 1943. He was to remain in hospital for the rest of his short life . . . "

Other early casualties include the American violinists Michael Rabin and Penny Ambrose (the latter a suicide at 17) and the English pianists Terrence Judd and John Ogdon. And not all prodigies continue to develop: The late recordings of Jascha Heifetz are not markedly different from those he made at 16 (if anything, they are marred by a certain impatient aggression that was not present in his first discs). Many believe that another violinist, Yehudi Menuhin, who was world famous by the age of 12, never quite recovered from his imperfect training -- that his early playing was inspired by a youthful mixture of passion and poise he was never able to recapture in maturity.

According to Julian Stanley, a pioneer in the education of gifted children and the founder and director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, there are two kinds of prodigies -- children "force-fed from an early age, who are very bright to start out with and then pushed to the limit by their parents in the conscious effort to produce a prodigy," and the occasional "extraordinary child who just comes into the world with the desire to make music or with a fascination for square roots."

Helfgott was "force-fed" by a particularly insensitive father, who pushed the boy to learn the "Rach Third" (as it is referred to throughout the film) at a point when he should properly have been working on his scales and some of the easier Chopin miniatures and Mozart piano sonatas. One is reminded of the unspeakable mother and father who sent their 7-year-old aviator up into stormy skies, chasing a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Piano prodigy David Helfgott, far left above in a family portrait, is the subject of the movie "Shine," directed by Scott Hicks and starring Geoffrey Rush.

But what is the parent of a gifted youngster to do -- just sit back and ignore an eager, blossoming talent? After all, Gary Graffman, who began his career as a pianist and later served as the president of the Curtis Institute of Music, has pointed out that almost every professional musician has been a child prodigy in one way or another. "They all start off between the ages of 3 and 5, maybe 6 or 7 at the outside," he once told this reporter. "It really isn't going to happen for them otherwise. If you are going to flourish during your teens, you have to have a pretty good technique by then. Because technique is just the beginning."

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a former prodigy who has been at the top of his profession since his late teens, is now in his early forties and a father himself. "I hear parents telling their kids that they too can be famous soloists if they work hard enough," he once said. "That, to me, is the worst thing you can do to a child.

"If you lead them toward music, teach them that it is beautiful and help them learn -- say, 'Oh, you love music, well, let's work on this piece together, and I'll show you something,' then that's very different," he continued. "That's a creative nurturing. But if you just push them to be stars, and tell them they'll become rich and famous -- or, worse, if you try to live through them -- that is damaging. For all of the pushing I received -- and it was considerable -- my parents had a high regard for learning, and that saved me."

Perhaps the greatest of musical prodigies to appear in recent years is the Japanese American violinist Midori. She became famous in 1986 at the age of 14 when she delivered a gleaming, note-perfect rendition of Leonard Bernstein's Serenade for Violin Solo, Strings, Harp and Percussion under Bernstein's direction at Tanglewood -- all this despite breaking not just one but two strings in the course of the performance and having to borrow other violins in mid-concert to continue. "When it was over, audience, orchestra, and conductor-composer joined in giving her a cheering, stomping, whistling standing ovation," John Rockwell reported in a front-page article in the New York Times.

Overnight, Midori became a superstar. She deserved it, and she deserves her continuing celebrity today. If her interpretations might fairly be described as "middle of the road" -- her playing is startlingly devoid of any tics or mannerisms -- the fact remains that her traditionalism is much more than learned mimicry. Every note sings; every phrase bears the force of conviction. There are certainly more "interesting" violinists around, but it is hard to think of one who pleases so consistently.

Still, in her early twenties, Midori would seem to have gone through a crisis. Long after it was appropriate, she still dressed in little-girl Popsicle colors and came across as an eternal moppet. She talked incessantly about Snoopy, and her body language -- when she wasn't playing the violin -- was that of a child, one well aware of her Lilliputian charm. At age 22, she took a season off for an unspecified "digestive disorder." Fortunately, when she returned to performing the following year, she came back with a new and pronounced maturity, dressed in a dark green evening gown, greeting the audience with a dignified bow and then playing magnificently. Further appearances (Midori is now 25) have confirmed the impression of a fully grown artist who has finally put the sideshow behind her.

Unfortunately, and through no fault of her own, Midori's success inspired a run on "cute kid" prodigies from the ever-hungry, ever-exploitative big-bucks classical music business. Suddenly we were presented with a string of lesser artists (most prominently Sarah Chang and the crossover star Vanessa-Mae) who were all about the same age Midori was when she started out. Indeed, on the very day that Midori canceled her season in 1993, I received calls from two different public relations firms touting their clients, both of whom were supposedly the "next Midori."

What kind of world is it when a great artist is (wrongly) believed washed up at 22 and (worse) considered a replaceable commodity? The mania for prodigies is one of the sickest aspects of the music business; one critic friend refuses to attend their concerts. "If they're really good," he reckons, "they'll stick around and likely have more to say when they're all grown up."

How far we have come from the days when one turned to old masters for authority! The wonderfully poetic Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti (1917-1950) did not play Beethoven in public until the last year of his life; he did not yet feel "ready." Arthur Rubinstein continued to grow throughout his 75-year career and recorded many works more than once; in almost every case, his latest version of a favorite piece is the one to be preferred.

But what record company would sign a Rubinstein today, with so many nubile teenagers around who take such nifty photographs and who might even be available for a music video? "And a little child shall lead them," the Bible says, but one wonders whether we were really meant to be "led" through the most profound works in the literature by artists with only a few years of experience behind them, to say nothing of all the painful and necessary wisdom that can come along only with growing up.

Helfgott certainly has that wisdom, but it is still unclear just how much performing he will be doing in the future (those who are interested in his pianism are directed to the soundtrack of the film, available from Philips Classics, which contains music by Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Chopin and others, played with poetry, originality and fire). He continues to live in Australia, where he has made a happy marriage; Gillian Helfgott is credited by one and all as a significant -- perhaps the significant -- force in the pianist's renewal.

"David's music is one thing," Hicks said. "David's story is another. It touches people because they realize that clearly it is about redemption. It's about being able to survive experiences that none of us would want to come out on the other side -- in love, loved, and playing music to audiences."

"It took us a long time to win the Helfgotts' trust," Hicks recalled. "Finally they let us proceed, but on the understanding that they could remove David's name from the story if they were unhappy with the final film. And so I remember showing it to them when we were all finished -- a little nervously, you know. Watching David watch himself was the most amazing thing. He gave little laughs of recognition throughout the film, and he wept at the depiction of his relationship with his father. But when it was over, he told me it was about the greatest film he'd ever seen. 'Brilliantissimo,' he called it.

"He was a child prodigy at 10 and he was still a child prodigy at 40, with this great gift that he would not -- could not -- explore. But now he has begun to reclaim fragments of his lost career. Redemption through love, just like the legend. And Gillian is his anchor."

GRAPHIC: Photo, Lisa Tomasetti/Fine Line Features; Photo, Sue Helfgott; Photo, Nancy Andrews, Piano prodigy David Helfgott, far left above in a family portrait, is the subject of the movie "Shine," directed by Scott Hicks and starring Geoffrey Rush, below from left. Recent violin prodigies have included Midori, top left, and Vanessa-Mae. While Yehudi Menuhin, top right, and Jascha Heifetz were young sensations earlier in the century.