Toni Servillo in Loro (Gianni Fiorito/IFC Films)

Director Paolo Sorrentino gave himself un gran lavoro with the movie Loro, a meditation on the outrageous story of Silvio Berlusconi. The wily one-time cruise ship crooner rose to the center of Italian life and reigned for decades, dominating media and politics in a crazed blur of pay-to-play sex scandals and brazen corruption that warped what was acceptable in public life (and made Donald Trump look like Dudley Do-Right). Sorrentino’s opus opens big and exciting, but beguiled ambivalence toward its subject eventually deflates the film’s energy and leaves us with a molto italiano shoulder shrug that lets its shifty antihero off the hook.

It begins by tracing the machinations of Sergio (Riccardo Scamarcio), a hungry young hustler itching to enter the great Berlusconi’s orbit. When Sergio ravages a party girl from behind to the harsh rasp of the Stooges’ “Down on the Street” and notices a tattoo of Berlusconi’s face above her backside, it sets the tone for a hard, fast, and sleazy sequence devoted to palm greasing, pimping, and tough-guy and -girl dialogue. There’s nothing Sergio won’t use for access, including his complicit wife and his manipulative Albanian mistress and a harem of drugged-up young hotties eager for il capo’s favors.

This racy kickoff peters out about 45 minutes into the movie, when Berlusconi finally appears and promptly slows down the movie. Bewigged Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo captures the grinning potentate’s reptilian detachment but none of his bounce and cheer. As Berlusconi receives his fawning admirers at a boisterous festa, Sergio and his wife perch on a stalled merry-go-round and glumly concede that they’ll never make the inner circle. They promptly disappear from the narrative, which is a shame, as the focus and thrust soften fast.

Like Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza and The Young Pope, Loro will please fans with his trademark gorgeous shots and exotic set pieces. The director has plenty of imaginative, eye-catching tricks up his sleeve—they just lose power because he can’t stop himself from overusing them. The Stooges’ song, so perfect over raunchy sex, comes back far less effectively over a predatory coupling scene not much later. Berlusconi gets to sing schmaltzy songs on three occasions. Not one but two women deliver Berlusconi a righteous verbal comeuppance. The first is a sweet ingénue turned off by his old-man breath, the second is his long-suffering wife Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci), and both their monologues sound rather stagey and unconvincing (screenwriters Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello tend to let Berlusconi hog lines with self-serving explanations of his character’s behavior). Finally, the movie revels in endless scenes of glossily photographed seminude women groveling, gyrating, dancing, and making out with each other. Does this sexy eye-candy serve as a condemnation of power-corrupted sexuality or a visual feast for dirty old men? My money’s on the second option.

The later parts of Loro lag. The oomph has disappeared, replaced by a lion-in-winter self-pity and half-hearted forays into Berlusconi’s attempts at actual politics after a devastating earthquake. The film grows more and more forgiving of the aging leader as Berlusconi finally loses Veronica and complains and whines about the adversaries bent on ending his leadership. At the end, Sorrentino seems to be making a comparison of Berlusconi to Christ. It’s a dark, lovely moment, but even in a movie this indulgent of its rapscallion protagonist, the comparison gives pause. Maybe there’s a part of Italy that can never quite give Silvio Berlusconi up.