This account of the tough, troubled life of naive artist Antonio Liguabue boasts a committed performance from actor Elio Germano

Georgio Diritti has directed a lovely-looking and fervent film about the life of the 20th-century naive artist Antonio Ligabue, who suffered poverty and mental illness throughout his life but whose fierce, primitive, impassioned studies and sculptures of animals and human portraits made him celebrated in his own day as an authentic unschooled genius, and an object of cult fascination from the metropolitan elite who perhaps regarded him as comparable to Van Gogh. (There was another biopic in 1978, with Suspiria star Flavio Bucci in the lead.)

The Italian actor Elio Germano stars as Ligabue here, with a performance that has something of both Daniel Auteuil and Daniel Day Lewis — and also, maybe, a little of Sacha Baron Cohen. He plays him with the stoop, the shuffle, the fierce glare, the occasional equine twitch of the head and teeth-baring and drooping lower lip. This is a congenital dysfunction but also the natural brusqueness of the creative spirit and someone who does not suffer fools gladly (despite or because of being dismissed as a fool all his life). And for all that Ligabue once lived an almost feral existence, he is someone with some sense of the good things in life, particularly a decent meal in a restaurant.