Starring Willem Dafoe. In Italian and English, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

Never known for his subtlety, Italian-American director Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, Body Snatchers) here takes on another transgressive autore. He restricts himself to the last 24 hours of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s trouble-prone life, which ended suddenly in 1975. And despite notable complications rising from casting, concept, and structure, the film works remarkably well.

Pasolini’s calling card, and its chief weirdness, is having Willem Dafoe as the great Italian director, whose challenges to Italy’s then-powerful Catholic establishment led to rumours of assassination that remain unconfirmed. Ferrara’s take simply finds the middle-aged maestro cruising Roman side streets for rough trade at the end of a tough day of storyboarding and hassling interviewers. But lest you suspect this is a narrow, claustrophobic setup, be assured that the film is, if anything, too wide-ranging in its concerns and techniques.

Dafoe tosses off a few lines in Italian to kick things off and then mostly sticks to English, thus obliging the international cast to haltingly speak his language. But there are also flashback sequences in Italian and snippets from Salò, his final and most (justifiably) controversial film—Pasolini felt that offending people was part of his revolutionary duty—plus depictions of what he envisioned as his next effort. These semimystical satires feature the elderly Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s onetime partner and muse, himself played in other scenes by Riccardo Scamarcio (of Burnt and The Best of Youth). Elsewhere, frequent Pasolini star Adriana Asti plays the director’s doting mamma, and Portugal’s Maria de Medeiros enlivens the tale as Laura Betti, who flitted between art movies and exploitation flicks in the ’70s.

Hope you’re keeping track of all this, and ready to catch references to contemporary films by Federico Fellini (like Amarcord) and Bernardo Bertolucci (especially The Conformist) in this fascinatingly ambivalent love letter to the decadent years of Italy’s best cinema—and an ode to the struggles of creativity itself.