‘In The Hand Of Dante’ review: Oscar Isaac takes a dual role in Julian Schnabel’s offbeat biopic

Dir: Julian Schnabel. US. 2025. 153mins

Artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel may by no means be accused of missing sheer enthusiasm and wild-eyed flamboyance. The gusto beforehand on show within the likes of Basquiat, Earlier than Evening Falls, and The Diving Bell And The Butterfly carries the all-out barmy, generally baffling In The Hand Of Dante, which each is and isn’t a movie about Italy’s hallowed bard Dante Alighieri.

 A rambling, free-associative really feel

A type of mock-biopic fantasia on each Dante and the late US author Nick Tosches, the movie flounders regardless of some entertaining and generally ripely décor-chomping performances. Sheer vigour, nevertheless intermittent, saves Schnabel from getting into his personal circle of cinematic Hell, however after the movie’s Venice premiere, it dangers floundering in business Purgatory.

Viewers anticipating an easy portrayal of Dante – as recommended by the opening photos of Oscar Isaac, modelled on canonical depictions of the person – could also be stymied by what follows, because the movie jumps from Renaissance Italy to modern-day New Jersey. It mixes realistically mounted excerpts from Dante’s life, shot in color, with black and white sequences following the fictionalised adventures of US scribe Nick Tosches. Schnabel and co-writer (and co-editor) Louise Kugelberg have actually tailored a 2002 novel by Tosches – an esteemed journalist and author finest identified for biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin – by which the author spins an elaborate autofictional fantasy about himself and Dante; each males performed right here by Oscar Isaac.

This Tosches is a streetwise powerful cookie, first glimpsed as a youngster receiving a life lesson from his uncle (a ripe, raspy Al Pacino cameo) after stabbing one other boy. A lover of Dante’s oeuvre, about which he holds forth rapturously in a diner scene, Tosches is recruited by the baddest of dangerous hombres – a mob boss (John Malkovich, irrepressibly appearing from the scalp) and his horrible henchman Louie (Gerard Butler). Butler is hideously entertaining as an obnoxious, sewer-mouthed psychopath, and likewise performs a smirking Pope Boniface within the historic sequences – a part of the movie’s playful, if faintly gratuitous-seeming, recreation of doubles.

Tosches heads to Sicily searching for a legendary misplaced manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy written within the poet’s personal hand – with Louie recklessly strewing a bloody path of lifeless mafiosi and librarians alike. In the meantime, again within the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an intermittent sequence of scenes depict moments from Dante’s life; their import and continuity not at all times evident to anybody who hasn’t taken the time to bone up on key Renaissance occasions. Central to this strand is an prolonged cameo by the movie’s government producer Martin Scorsese, no much less, sporting an enormous white Gandalf beard because the mysterious sage Isaiah.

Gal Gadot flits out and in, taking part in each Dante’s spouse Gemma (who bought the quick straw in his life, being the sister of his famously beloved Beatrice) and as present-day Giulietta, Tosches’s stand-in secretary and eventual love curiosity. Within the former position, Gadot is pretty inert; within the latter, simmering and flirtatious, and more and more in her factor because the movie turns into a type of worldwide motion thriller. A white-suited, white-fedora’d Jason Momoa looms because the ‘last boss’ heavy, with Sabrina Impacciatore (The White Lotus season 2) as an instructional who will do something to make sure the success of her thesis.

By the point the movie’s composer, pop artist Benjamin Clementine, seems holding forth in grandly Shakespearean vein because the mysterious ‘Mephistopheles’, it’s fairly clear that we’ve spun manner past the parameters of typical narrative coherence – though the sheer larkiness is intermittently heady in its personal manner. Clementine’s rating, mixing lush orchestrations and delicate piano, is as unashamedly wayward because the movie itself.

The historic content material is elegantly mounted, manufacturing designer Paki Meduri excelling with comparatively restricted assets. However these sequences really feel stilted and theatrical, particularly given the excessive fustian tenor of the interval dialogue – not that the up to date strand doesn’t itself function some poetic flights of exaltation.

The movie, as is commonly the case with Schnabel, has a rambling, free-associative really feel, though right here the impressionistic inserts – together with skyscapes and time-lapse close-ups of flowers – should not fairly as organically built-in as regular. He additionally appears, on sheer whim, to drop in blasts of the Rolling Stones, Canned Warmth, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (the timeless ‘Wooly Bully’) – however who can argue with such fleeting touches of earthly Paradise?