Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness review – Johnny Depp’s Modigliani as bohemian badass

Some very cliched roistering, life-affirming wine-drinking, bourgeois-defying artistic shenanigans here from the veteran screenwriting couple Jerzy and Mary Olson-Kromolowski who have adapted a 1980 stage play, Modigliani by Dennis McIntyre, about the Italian sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani, known as Modi. Johnny Depp directs and perhaps sees his subject as a bohemian badass not unlike Hunter S Thompson, whom he played in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and perhaps not altogether unlike how he sees himself.

It is 1916 in Paris and the brutality of war is destroying the belle époque; Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani, a brilliant, sensual but penniless artist facing poverty and casual antisemitism. Having got into a chaotic affray at a pompous posh restaurant – filmed like a deleted scene from Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers – Modigliani has to lie low from the police and dreams of quitting Paris, to the bewilderment of his quaintly imagined artist comrades Maurice Utrillo (Bruno Gouery) and Chaïm Soutine (Ryan McParland), and his lover (and subject) Beatrice Hastings (Antonia Desplat).

But according to his longsuffering dealer Léopold Zborowski (Stephen Graham) he has to wait three days for a certain wealthy collector to hit town – a collector that Zborowski assures Modigliani is interested in his work; this is Maurice Gangnat, played in cameo by Al Pacino. So Modigliani must go to ground, restlessly haunting the streets and the lowlife nightspots pursued by his own demons.

This lavishly produced and costumed European co-production is handsomely cast – but the range of talent here feels wasted on what is a fundamentally dated and stereotypical drama, whose Bohemian passion is diluted. Scamarcio does his best and he is arguably the best actor for the job, but there is something rather shallow here.