Academy Award-nominee Helena Bonham Carter stars alongside Judy Davis, Callum Keith Rennie and newcomer Kyle Catlett (who stars in the title role) in “The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet” — a new adventure film based on the best-seller “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet” by Reif Larsen.
T.S. Spivet is a 10-year-old prodigy with a passion for cartography and scientific inventions. His special scientific talents generally go unnoted by both his teacher and his family. He lives on a ranch in Montana with his mother (Helena Bonham Carter), a beautiful, vivacious passionate amateur etymologist who is obsessed with the morphology of beetles, his father (a cowboy born a hundred years too late), and his 14-year-old sister who dreams of becoming Miss America. His twin brother Layton died in an accident involving a firearm in the family's barn, which no one ever speaks of.
One day, T.S. receives an unexpected call from the Smithsonian museum telling him that he is the winner of the very prestigious Baird prize for his invention of a perpetual motion machine and that he is invited to a reception in his honor where he is expected to give a speech. Unable to collect it for obvious reasons (he is just a child), T.S. steals out one night to undertake the journey alone.
Without telling anyone, he sets out on a freight train across the United States to reach Washington, D.C. But no one there suspects that the lucky winner is a ten-year-old child with a secret.