Schnabel's 'In the Hand of Dante' Hits Netflix. It's a Folly, and Oscar Isaac Is the Only Reason to Sit Through It.

Julian Schnabel made a 153-minute movie about Dante Alighieri, a stolen manuscript, and the New York Mafia, and as of June 24 it is sitting in your Netflix queue between a true-crime docuseries and the fourth season of something you stopped watching. It went to theaters first, on June 12, and almost nobody went. It premiered at Venice last September and the reviews came back mostly cold. Now it has the biggest audience it will ever get, which feels like the right moment to tell you what you are walking into.

You are walking into a folly. I mean that close to literally. Owen Gleiberman, reviewing it for Variety out of Venice, used that exact word, "a folly," and he was being generous. The thing is gorgeous and exasperating in roughly equal measure, and the half that works is good enough that I understand the people defending it and the half that doesn't is bad enough that I understand the people who wanted their two and a half hours back.

What it actually is

Schnabel, the painter who also directed "Basquiat" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," adapted a 2002 novel by Nick Tosches, the kind of book the New York Times called "a splendid, passionate mess" when it came out. He kept the mess. The movie runs on two tracks. In one, shot in widescreen black and white, a version of Tosches himself (Oscar Isaac) gets pulled into the orbit of a vicious mobster named Louie (Gerard Butler) and his boss, Joe Black (John Malkovich), and told to authenticate a copy of "The Divine Comedy" supposedly written in Dante's own hand. That hunt drags him through a strange New York underground and eventually toward the Vatican.

In the other track, shot in vivid color in the 1400s, Isaac also plays Dante, wandering through his own inferno toward the poem. Martin Scorsese turns up as Dante's mentor. Al Pacino cameos as Tosches' uncle. Butler doubles as Pope Boniface VIII. Gal Gadot plays the woman Tosches lost and the woman Dante loved. Jason Momoa plays a tough guy. If that cast list reads like a fever dream, the movie plays like one too.

The half that works

Two things hold it together. The first is Oscar Isaac, who is asked to carry two lead performances in two centuries and two color palettes and does it without breaking a sweat. He is the only person on screen who seems to fully know what movie he is in. The second is the camera. Cinematographer Roman Vasyanov, who shot "Fury," gives the past its color and the present its hard black and white, and the contrast does more thematic work than most of the dialogue. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com, no pushover here, landed on the honest version of the divided response: "If someone told me they loved this ambitious nonsense, I'd get it."

Butler is having a great time, chewing the scenery like he stepped off a "Den of Thieves" set and onto a Renaissance fresco. Scorsese, of all people, is loose and watchable, a reminder that he could have acted for a living. When the movie locks into a single register, usually the period stuff, it can be genuinely beautiful.

The half that doesn't

Then it loses the thread, over and over. At 153 minutes there is a lot of thread to lose. Schnabel keeps opening a promising door and walking through a different, worse one. There is a scene where Butler's mobster delivers a long monologue about how he hates watching attractive women clean up after their dogs, capped with a punchline that gets uncomfortably close to necrophilia. That is the whole movie's problem in miniature. Some of these detours are character. Most of them are a director in love with his own digressions.

The casting doesn't help. Gadot and Momoa are stranded in roles that need precision and get pose instead, and every time the film cuts to them the air goes out of the room. Hannah Strong at Little White Lies wrote the cruelest accurate line of the bunch: "Schnabel's film isn't even entertaining enough to count as a compelling disaster." The aggregate tells the same story. On Rotten Tomatoes it is sitting at 43 percent, average rating 4.2 out of 10, critics split between calling it an interesting failure and calling it listless dreck.

The verdict

Here is where I land. This is a real artist swinging as hard as he can at something most directors would never touch, and missing about half his shots. The period sequences and Isaac's two performances are worth your time. The contemporary mob stuff and the runtime are not. If you go in expecting a great movie you will be angry by the ninety-minute mark. If you go in to watch a serious filmmaker fail at scale, which is its own kind of pleasure, you will get exactly that. I would rather watch this than another algorithm-built blockbuster, and I would not blame you for turning it off.

BCN Score: 5.5/10. A beautiful, maddening misfire. Watch it for Oscar Isaac and the camera, and keep the remote close.