No matter what happens in Pietro Marcello’s episodic, proto-tragic, and utterly Italian Martin Eden, the director has one ace in the hole: the lean, beguiling face of leading man Luca Marinelli. Alive with bold-featured mobility, the face is a battlefield where the tumult of the streets fights it out with noble aspirations. Marinelli’s martyred beauty conveys a force of will that confers this class parable/fall from grace story with a power it may not deserve. 

Martin Eden is based on the novel by Jack London about a self-made writer’s rise and collapse, but the film is initially steeped in the docklands of Naples, that most Italian of cities, with its restless laborers, crooked bosses, and atmosphere of picturesque corruption. Like the recent noted Italian film Happy as Lazzaro, Martin Eden traffics in a kind of anachronistic timelessness, featuring a pastiche of clothes, backgrounds, and pop music from the 1930s through the 1980s. Imaginative use of stock footage of magic-hour urban scenes and children at play introduces a poignant sense of the past joining the present. Before the action in Martin Eden even gets started, there’s already a lot going on.

Proletarian Martin slinks around the port with animalistic grace, and his luck changes when he rescues a rich, drunken young man from a beating and he’s invited to the aristocratic family’s palazzo. Martin’s rough charm and openness disarm the family and lead to his acceptance in their midst. Less welcome is his attraction to the young man’s sister, Elena (Jessica Cressy). The untutored worker’s courtship of the virginal woman young recalls other Italian films like The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with the man worshiping an impossibly ladylike, pristine object in an atmosphere of inert yet high-strung veneration.

Elena encourages Martin to get an education and devote his efforts to a literary career that could raise his social status to match hers. His fumbling, futile first attempts at writing lead to estrangement from his family and a train journey to a new chapter in life: on board he meets an archetypal Italian mamma and moves into her house, using it as a writing bolthole before finally racking acceptance letters. Martin Eden’s camera lingers over typewriters, papers, and printing presses, both important as symbols of authorship and nostalgic totems of a pre-internet world where socially conscious writing really meant something.

Now that he is on his way as a writer, it is time for Martin to beat a path back to his principessa on a pedestal. Can he overcome class prejudice to win his lady? An awkward garden party and an encounter with a corrupt mentor figure augur poorly. So does a meeting with Elena where Martin becomes embroiled in a flag-waving communist demonstration and tells his girlfriend that she is a pampered snob who knows nothing about life. Martin has come so far and achieved so much, but frustratingly he can’t get his hands on what he worked so hard to earn. Here the film strikes a note of universal despair that transcends the plight of its toiling main character.

A note which dissipates quickly, as the film fast-forwards into a final chapter of Paolo Sorrentino–esque decadence that lingers past its allotted space of dramatic interest. Now rich and (rather unconvincingly) world-famous, Martin sports a head of fabulous dyed-platinum hair and a mouthful of rotten teeth. Everyone in his life has been reduced to a nonentity, or worse, a servant. At lectures, he plays the aging enfant terrible, cursing tittering audiences delighted to be shocked. As drums beat for an unnamed future war, Martin cleanses himself with a (fully clothed) self-baptism on the beach, evoking the religious imagery from films like Happy as Lazzaro and Sorrentino’s Loro.

Martin Eden is made with vision, heart, and artistry. What keeps it from complete success? A self-consciously epic view of class struggle, too much overt borrowing from classic Italian films, and a certain masculine self-seriousness may be the culprits. Regardless of whether the film meets its own expectations, heart-stirring scenes of Italian life and Luca Marinelli’s ruggedly gorgeous looks and leading-man performance will keep you watching the screen. The film is an unusual piece of work, out of time and timeless for better or worse.