Oscar Isaac plays the man who wrote the Divine Comedy and the man hired to steal it. That single decision sits at the center of In the Hand of Dante, and it explains the kind of film Julian Schnabel has made — one that puts the sacred and the criminal in the same body and dares you to tell them apart. The manuscript at the heart of the plot is the holiest object the story can imagine. Everyone who touches it wants to sell it.

The story comes from Nick Tosches’ 2002 novel, which Schnabel adapted with Louise Kugelberg. A handwritten copy of the Divine Comedy, in Dante’s own hand, surfaces inside the Vatican library, and word of it travels to a New York mob that has no use for poetry and a precise sense of what poetry is worth. Tosches — a writer, a Dante scholar, a man who has run through his other options — is the one sent to bring it out. Isaac is Tosches in a black-and-white New York and Dante in the colorized Italy of the 1300s, and Schnabel cuts between the two timelines until the gap between a creator and a thief starts to look like a choice of lens rather than a question of soul.

The source matters here, because Tosches was not a neutral choice of author. He spent his life writing about obsession — boxers, mafiosi, country singers, his own appetites — in prose that treated the search for something pure as inseparable from the hunger to possess it. Schnabel keeps the novel’s most provocative move, which is to write Tosches himself into the story as the thief, so the man who imagined stealing Dante becomes the man doing it. The medieval strand answers that gesture in kind: it does not treat Dante as a marble bust but as a working writer scratching out lines, hounded by exile and politics, building the afterlife one terzina at a time. Both halves are about labor, not legend.

Schnabel has spent his whole career as a director climbing inside the heads of artists. He painted before he filmed, and his movies — Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the Van Gogh portrait At Eternity’s Gate — treat the act of making art as the only subject worth the camera’s full attention. In the Hand of Dante extends that fixation in the most literal form available to him. It puts the artist and the relic he made in the same frame, then crowds both with people who want to own the relic and feel nothing for the art. The manuscript is the surface object. The real subject is what nearness to genius does to a man who can only covet it.

He builds the cast to make that collision land. Gerard Butler plays a Manhattan gangster and, seven centuries earlier, Pope Boniface VIII; the doubling is the thesis, secular muscle and sacred authority wearing the same threat. Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese — the two men most responsible for the American mob movie as audiences understand it — both appear, and Scorsese, who almost never steps in front of a camera, takes the role of Dante’s mentor. Gal Gadot, John Malkovich, Jason Momoa, Benjamin Clementine and Sabrina Impacciatore round out an ensemble Schnabel handles less like a unified company than like a sequence of entrances, each performer given a register and told to lean into it.

The result is operatic and deliberately volatile, swinging between reverence for Dante and pulp relish for the mob, sometimes inside the same scene. That volatility is precisely what divided the room when the film premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Some read the swing as conviction — a director reaching for something larger than good taste. Others read it as a filmmaker reaching past his grip. Both reactions are legible in the finished film, because Schnabel never sands down the seams. He wants you to feel the centuries grinding against each other.

Strip away the festival context and the question changes shape. On Netflix, a 153-minute literary epic does not arrive draped in red-carpet ceremony; it lands in a queue, one tile among thousands, beside the comfort television it has nothing in common with. That is its own kind of test. A film this demanding has to hold an audience that can leave with a thumb, not just walk out of a theater — and the early critical split suggests it will keep dividing people long after Venice has moved on.

Which leads to the story MCM keeps circling: the economics underneath the marquee. Netflix bought a painter-director’s most expensive passion project, granted it a twelve-day theatrical window, and then folded it into the global stream. The Scorsese-and-Pacino casting is not incidental on that platform. It is the same canon Netflix already absorbed with The Irishman, now put to work inside a film about whether anything holy can survive contact with money. A movie about the commodification of something priceless is being delivered by the most efficient commodification machine the business has built. The medium is arguing the movie’s case for it.

There is a craft logic holding all of this together, even when the tone refuses to settle. Schnabel directs like the painter he is, letting color temperature and surface carry meaning ahead of plot — the medieval passages staged for their light, the New York scenes for their grain. He trusts his actors to overreach because overreaching is the point; restraint would betray a story about men who cannot stop grasping. Casting Scorsese as a mentor figure is the clearest version of that instinct. It imports the entire weight of the American crime film as a body in the room, not a reference in the script.

Underneath the heist and the spectacle, the film keeps one question open, and it is the one the plot cannot close. Can getting your hands on something sacred redeem a man who only knows how to covet it — or is possession simply one more way to be damned? Tosches reaches for the manuscript the way Dante reached for the divine, but reaching has never been the same as arriving. The manuscript moves from hand to hand and saves no one who holds it. Schnabel declines to say whether art’s transcendence is real or just another thing men will kill to own. He films the reaching and lets it stand.

In the Hand of Dante - Netflix — In the Hand of Dante. (L-R) Oscar Isaac as Dante and Gal Gadot as Gemma in In the Hand of Dante. Cr. Alex Majoli/ITHOD Productions Ltd. © 2026.

Whether that lands as a major late-career statement or a glorious overreach is the argument the film was built to start — and on Netflix it will reach the audience large enough to settle it. Either way, it is the rare streaming release that treats its own medium as part of the subject, and that is worth showing up for.

In the Hand of Dante premiered out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival and opens in US theaters on June 12 before streaming worldwide on Netflix from June 24. Julian Schnabel directs from a screenplay he wrote with Louise Kugelberg, adapting the novel by Nick Tosches. Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa and Martin Scorsese lead the cast. The running time is 153 minutes.