In the Hand of Dante: Julian Schnabel’s Twelve-Year Obsession Reaches the Screen

By Alexander Stone

Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante – known in certain territories as Dante’s Code – is a film that arrived on screen already burdened with more than a decade of accumulated expectation. First announced in 2008 when Johnny Depp optioned the rights through his Infinitum Nihil production company, the project lurched through development hell before Oscar Isaac replaced Depp in September 2023 and cameras finally rolled in Italy the following month. The film received its world premiere out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on 3 September 2025, and after Netflix acquired distribution rights in early 2026, it arrived in select US theatres on 12 June before streaming from 24 June. At 153 minutes, it is both Schnabel’s most ambitious construction and, depending on whom you ask, his most polarising.

That it took Schnabel, a painter turned filmmaker who has spent his career wrestling with artists consumed by their own visions, to attempt this adaptation feels almost inevitable. His filmography reads like a catalogue of creative obsession: Jean-Michel Basquiat in Basquiat (1996), Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (2000), Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate (2018). Each of these films concerns a figure for whom art was not a profession but a condition, and each finds Schnabel probing the point at which devotion becomes self-destruction.

The Source: Tosches and His Divine Obsession

Nick Tosches, who died in Manhattan in October 2019 at sixty-nine, was never a comfortable figure in American letters. Born in Newark and raised in his father’s bars, he dispensed with university and educated himself through the King James Bible, Faulkner, and the cabalistic traditions he devoured in libraries and on the street. His literary career began in the late 1960s with rock journalism for Creem and Rolling Stone, and he produced biographical work – on Jerry Lee Lewis (Hellfire, 1982), Dean Martin (Dino, 1992), and boxer Sonny Liston (The Devil and Sonny Liston, 2000) – that established his reputation as a stylist of uncommon ferocity.

In the Hand of Dante, published by Little, Brown in September 2002, was Tosches’ third novel and his most structurally audacious. The book braids two parallel narratives: in fourteenth-century Sicily, Dante Alighieri labours to complete The Divine Comedy; in autumn 2001 New York, a fictionalised Tosches – a Dante scholar and self-described “hipster-outlaw legend” – is recruited by black market traders to authenticate a handwritten manuscript of Dante’s masterwork that has surfaced from the Vatican library. The New York Times called it “a strange, wild hybrid – part shootout, part exegesis – a splendid, passionate mess.” Tosches rails against monopolistic publishing houses and any force that would reduce a seven-hundred-year-old poem to a commodity. The book’s central conceit – that Tosches might be Dante’s reincarnation – carries an audacity that borders on the absurd, yet he commits to it with the conviction of a man who has nothing left to prove.

Schnabel’s Decade in Development

The road from page to screen was punishingly long. Depp’s Infinitum Nihil acquired the rights in 2008; Schnabel was announced as director in 2011, but the project remained speculative as Depp’s career underwent seismic shifts. In September 2023, Schnabel told Variety that Isaac had replaced Depp. “Oscar had been aware of this for a long time,” Schnabel said. “At first Johnny was going to do it, then he got involved in other things and we haven’t talked in a long time.”

Production commenced in Italy in October 2023 under a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement. Principal locations included Venice, Padua, Verona, and Palermo – with Bracciano standing in for Florence, which Schnabel deemed “distorted by tourism.” The 14th-century sequences were shot in saturated colour by cinematographer Roman Vasyanov, while the modern New York scenes were rendered in black-and-white. The distinction is not merely aesthetic: as Schnabel told Variety, “the gangsters are living in purgatory, grovelling around and looking at this thing – The Divine Comedy – like it’s some sort of commodity. Instead, the trees were green and the skies were real.”

Isaac’s Dual Performance

The casting of Oscar Isaac as both Nick Tosches and Dante Alighieri is the film’s central gambit, and by most critical accounts its most persuasive element. Isaac, who worked with Schnabel on At Eternity’s Gate, brings to both roles a physical and vocal commitment that anchors the film’s more extravagant tendencies. In the modern sequences, he adopts the louche long hair and “snaky hostility” of a man who has made an identity out of literary defiance; in the historical sequences, he recites Dante’s verse in the original Italian.

“Oscar Isaac, with louche long hair and a snaky hostility, plays Nick Tosches,” wrote Owen Gleiberman in Variety, “a journalist who’s a hipster-outlaw legend.” The dual performance demands that Isaac navigate two registers simultaneously: the hard-boiled crime thriller and the contemplative register of Dante’s story. The Film Stage observed that Isaac’s cadence as he recites Dante in Italian is “remarkably easy to let yourself be lulled by,” while in the modern timeline, “Isaac’s face has been chiselled by Nick’s stubbornness.”

The doubling extends throughout the cast: Gerard Butler plays both the modern-day hitman Louie and the 14th-century Pope Boniface VIII; Gal Gadot appears as both Giulietta and Gemma Donati, Dante’s wife; Louis Cancelmi portrays both Lefty and the medieval nobleman Guido da Polenta. The conceit is the film’s thesis statement – Schnabel’s belief that “there is no future, there is no past, but only the eternal present.”

The Ensemble and the Scorsese Factor

The supporting cast is formidable. John Malkovich plays Joe Black, the mob boss who recruits Nick, performing with what Screen Daily described as “irrepressible acting from the scalp.” Al Pacino appears as Uncle Carmine, to whom the pre-adolescent Tosches confesses a murder – a flashback the Boston Globe singled out as containing “the best acting you’ll see here.” Franco Nero, who played the title role in Django (1966), portrays Don Lecco. Jason Momoa is Rosario, a figure from the underworld.

Then there is Martin Scorsese. The legendary director appears in a small but symbolically charged role as Isaiah, an elderly sage who mentors Dante during the composition of The Divine Comedy. With his flowing grey beard and robes, Scorsese cuts an almost elvish figure, offering counsel on God and art. The casting carries a metatextual charge: one of cinema’s supreme artists, at eighty-two, playing the ancient mentor who tells a younger creator that the work is worth the suffering. Scorsese’s involvement connects the film to a wider tradition of filmmakers appearing in works about the creative process – a dialogue with cinema’s past that, as our coverage of Venice 2025 explored, defined the 82nd edition of the festival.

Reception: A Folly That Pulsates With Life

Critical response has been sharply divided, though the most perceptive reviews acknowledge the film’s ambition. Gleiberman, in Variety, called it “a folly that pulsates with life,” praising Schnabel’s ability to “streamline [the novel] into an entertainingly low-down saga of the place where violent crime meets poetic passion.” Pete Hammond at Deadline observed that “few these days seem to be taking this kind of big swing.” The Indiewire review likened it to “Schnabel’s Megalopolis” – finding it “epically miscalculated despite stretches of grandeur.” Little White Lies was harshest, describing the experience as being “dragged through the various levels of hell across 2.5 turgid hours.”

What all these reviews share is a recognition that In the Hand of Dante does not play it safe. In an era when mid-budget adult drama is an endangered species, the sight of a painter-turned-filmmaker spending twelve years bringing a 377-page novel about medieval Italian poetry to the screen – and assembling Isaac, Scorsese, Pacino, and Malkovich to do so – is itself a statement about what cinema can be. For a deeper look at how this intersects with the legacy of artist-driven cinema, see our retrospective on Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic artistry.

A Meditation on Immortality

What elevates In the Hand of Dante above its conventional thriller elements is its willingness to treat the question of artistic immortality with genuine seriousness. In Tosches’ novel and in Schnabel’s adaptation, the manuscript of The Divine Comedy is not merely a MacGuffin – it is a symbol of the human desire to create something that outlasts the creator. Dante wrote his masterpiece in exile, believing it would be forgotten; Tosches wrote his novel knowing he was a footnote in a literary culture he despised. The film asks whether either man was right to believe their work would endure, and whether the endurance of art justifies the destruction it demands of the artist.

Schnabel, who has built a dual career as a celebrated painter and a filmmaker whose works have earned Academy Award nominations and the Cannes Best Director prize, understands this question from the inside. As he told Variety, making In the Hand of Dante reflected his own journey. The film is not merely an adaptation of Tosches’ novel but a dialogue between three men – Dante, Tosches, and Schnabel – each of whom believed that the act of creation was worth any price.

Whether audiences will find that argument persuasive remains to be seen. The film’s Netflix release on 24 June will bring it to a global audience of millions, a distribution context that would have delighted Tosches the provocateur and perhaps alarmed Tosches the purist. But the sheer improbability of the film’s existence – its twelve-year gestation, its cast of cinematic veterans, its director’s insistence on shooting in the Italian locations where Dante walked – constitutes its own form of defiance. In an age of content, In the Hand of Dante insists on being a film.