In the Hand of Dante: Julian Schnabel’s Cinema of imperfection
In the Hand of Dante sees Julian Schnabel bring Dante and Nick Tosches to the screen in a messy, dreamlike journey that grapples with imperfection and the search for meaning. A star-studded cast drives a provocative film that has already divided critics.
Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante had its world premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, a film that moves fluidly between dream and myth. It’s a rigorous, precise, and carefully constructed work, yet one that embraces wildness and imperfection – much like the characters at its center.
Oscar Isaac delivers a bold, full-throttle performance, pushing beyond conventional limits, and he’s matched by an ensemble equally willing to take risks. Schnabel’s film is both daring and divisive, the kind of artistic gamble that will ignite spirited debate long after the festival lights dim.
In the hand of Dante, The Plot
At the center of Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante lies a mystery that stretches across seven centuries, collapsing space and time into a narrative that links the real-life writer Nick Tosches with the towering figure of Dante Alighieri. The discovery of a manuscript – possibly the original Divine Comedy – sets off a dangerous race to prove its authenticity, while hinting at stakes far greater than historical fact.
Adapted from Tosches’ novel, the film moves restlessly between present-day New York and 14th-century Italy, where Nick’s life begins to echo and merge with Dante’s. Both men, consumed by their pursuit of love, beauty, and the divine, push themselves past the breaking point in a quest for answers that could reshape not just history, but existence itself.
In the hand of Dante, The Review
We may be in Dante’s hands, but more than anything we’re in Julian Schnabel’s. His adaptation of Nick Tosches’ novel breaks apart logic and convention in order to pursue a personal truth. The result leaves you walking out of the theater dazed, full of questions, but with one certainty: art here is inseparable from emotion.
This isn’t the sleek puzzle-making of Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code, nor the meticulous control of Steven Zaillian’s Ripley. In the Hand of Dante resists tidy analysis. Watching the film is like peeling back layers of cinematic form until only the raw encounter with art – and the full weight of human emotion – remains. It’s less about plot or logic and more about being immersed in the visceral, unpredictable power of cinema itself.
Time, humanity, and Schnabel’s vision
At Venice, Julian Schnabel framed his film with a characteristically bold statement: “There is no past or future. There is only what we are in the present. Even when our life ends, what we’ve done remains. Art remains, its meaning endures. Nothing exists outside of art itself.”
That idea runs through In the Hand of Dante. For Schnabel, time doesn’t unfold chronologically but is contained in the artwork itself. Whether or not the events on screen ever “happened” is beside the point; what matters is the truth that the act of creation preserves, a truth that insists on surviving even beyond death.
The film becomes a meditation on Nick Tosches’ chance to inhabit Dante, to grant the poet another life, to find beauty not in triumph but in failure and impermanence. Schnabel underlined this in Venice: “I know many artists who are immensely talented, but in their private lives they’re a mess. One of the few lessons I’ve learned is that perfection doesn’t exist. I’m interested in showing the human being and the artist within imperfection – like Dante, Caravaggio, Michelangelo.”
That philosophy shapes the movie: a portrait of human beings destined to stumble, driven by desires they can’t fulfill, always chasing the missing piece. It’s the essence of the Divine Comedy, especially the Inferno – fragility, yearning, and the comic tragedy of striving for the unattainable. Schnabel’s vision suggests we are all Dante: when we fall, when we rise, and when we choose – in a Nietzschean gesture – to dance on the improbable music of our own lives.
In the hand of Dante – Starring Oscar Isaac
Oscar Isaac: The Artist’s necessary exile
If the present is all we truly hold, the past is far from faded – as Oscar Isaac’s character reminds us, it is vivid, alive, and shaping who we are. Schnabel underscores this with his masterful play of light and shadow – a technique increasingly favored by American directors shooting in Italy – making clear that the past carries the hues of the present, and the present reflects those of the past.
Through this sense of “eternal return,” nothing is ever quite the same. Isaac, alongside Tosches, navigates this liminal space with fluidity, entering what the film calls an “impossible dream.” For him, as for Dante, this is an exile of the self, a journey that pushes toward deep self-discovery. Boundaries blur; abysses open.
As Isaac noted at the Venice press conference, “grace happens,” and Schnabel’s cinema insists that the artist, the man, and the author can sometimes merge. The film demonstrates that cinema still possesses the power to address art and poetry with authenticity, urgency, and vulnerability. Love it or hate it, In the Hand of Dante demands conversation.
As Schnabel might paraphrase Dante himself: the Divine Comedy, like any truly great work of art, is not a moral lesson absorbed in childhood – it is an experience that strikes unexpectedly, reshaping the way we see the world as adults.
The Cast: A chorus of voices
As Freud might have said, beauty and ugliness coexist – and In the Hand of Dante wears that truth on its sleeve. Gerard Butler and Jason Momoa deliver wonderfully unpredictable performances, teetering between chaos and charisma. Al Pacino and John Malkovich bring their familiar gravitas, grounding the film even as it swirls into Schnabel’s dreamlike vision.
The Italian cast – Franco Nero, Claudio Santamaria, and Sabrina Impacciatore – may appear briefly, but each leaves a mark, reminding us that even fleeting moments in cinema can carry immense weight. Big or small, polished or raw, every performance pulses with life, capturing the film’s central obsession: the imperfect, unstoppable, and utterly human pursuit of art, beauty, and meaning.
Final toughts
In the Hand of Dante is messy and imperfect, yet there’s a meticulous care in every frame. Like its characters, it revels in flaws while staying utterly sincere in its ambition. And through all the chaos, one truth persists: it is, at its heart: “l’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle”. Always love, driving everything forward.
In the hand of Dante, The Cast
Oscar Isaac
Gal Gadot
Gerard Butler
John Malkovich
Louis Cancelmi
Sabrina Impacciatore
Franco Nero
Benjamin Clementine
Paolo Bonacelli
Lorenzo Zurzolo
Martin Scorsese
Al Pacino
Jason Momoa
Mohamed Zouaoui
Claudio Santamaria
In the hand of Dante, Il Trailer
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