Review: Willem Dafoe's performance as a tortured soul nearly lifts 'Tommaso' from its director's self-indulgence

Veering between brutal self-examination and head-scratching inscrutability, writer-director Abel Ferrara reveals and conceals equally in “Tommaso,” a movie that keeps audiences hooked despite its deep-seated flaws because of its always-fascinating star, Willem Dafoe.

Dafoe plays the title character, an American filmmaker living in Italy who, we have to assume, is a stand-in for Ferrara himself. Tommaso lives what on the surface looks like a perfect life for a middle-aged artist: Married to the beautiful, and much younger, Nikki (Cristina Chiriac), and their 3-year-old daughter, Deedee (played by Ferrara’s own child, Anna). He spends his days learning Italian, teaching young actors, and developing the script for an existential science-fiction movie.

Not everything is perfect, though. Tommaso — who is six years’ sober, and uses his regular AA meetings as talk therapy — is frustrated is frustrated because Nikki is so invested in Deedee’s care that she never gives him time for romance.

For a creature of passions like Tommaso, enforced celibacy takes its toll — though in Ferrara’s telling, it’s sometimes up to the viewer to decide what’s really happening and what’s in his character’s head. He think he sees Nikki in the park, flirting with a younger man. And when Tommaso goes into a cafe, or his acting class, he’s presented with beautiful young women who are completely naked.

There’s more to Ferrara’s narrative than Tommaso going crazy because he can’t get laid — but what that extra something is open to the viewer’s interpretation. To get to that interpretation, the viewer must have the patience to stick with Tommaso’s mood swings and Ferrara’s oblique storytelling cues. Fans of Ferrara’s past work — most notably his controversial 1992 thriller “Bad Lieutenant” — will know what they’re getting into here, but newcomers may have trepidations about following him diwb his character’s dark path.

Dafoe, as he so often does, makes the trip interesting. As he did as Van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate,” Dafoe climes into the skin of the tortured artist and helps us understand — to some degree, at least — how the mental anguish fuels the creative fire. If Ferrara had given Dafoe a complete arc rather than an incomplete series of dead ends, “Tommaso” could have been their shared masterpiece, rather than an uneven portrait of artistic madness.

——

‘Tommaso’

★★1/2

Available beginning Friday, June 5, as a video-on-demand rental through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably R for graphic nudity, sexuality, violence and language. Running time: 118 minutes; mostly in English, but some in Italian with subtitles.