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Pietro Marcello’s inspired, intellectually nourishing and visually ravishing adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel honours life’s hard, concrete realities while permitting its characters, and by extension its audience, room to dream and swoon.

Marcello and fellow screenwriter Maurizio Braucci manage to tell what could be a fairly stereotypical tale – the struggling working class artist – with a clip and a twist that makes for something fresh and inventive.

Martin Eden is a sad story of a sad man who lacks the capacity for happiness and who is astonished to find that artistic success is as compromised as any other kind. But there is a kind of thrill in tracing his progress from rags to riches to annihilation.

It’s a nakedly political film as Martin finds himself at the heart of arguments about socialism and capitalism... it’s a daring spin on history and the power, or otherwise, of the individual: a puzzle that is well worth trying to solve.

The images are never less than gorgeous, but the delicate sentiment of the beginning... gradually dissipates in this forward rush. Luca Marinelli’s charismatic performance goes a long way towards counteracting this loss, though it unfortunately succumbs to caricature by film’s end, once Martin has been reduced to an archetype for the sake of allegory.

The mental cost of endlessly thinking and philosophising are readily apparent throughout Pietro Marcello’s mesmerising drama Martin Eden...

Intellectually and stylistically as bold as its hero, this is a gem of a film - not perfectly polished, but correspondingly unique.

Visual storytelling of this sort sings within the sensory deprivation tank of the cinema... [but] When viewed in multitask mode, the film really has little to offer. Its surface-level pleasures evaporate after its first act (that is, unless you enjoy watching men shout about libertarianism).

In theme and appearance, Martin Eden straddles such Italian cornerstones as De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Bertolucci’s The Conformist. It’s a sweep of cinematic history earned by the film’s aspirations. No film could replicate the tragic weight of London’s work, but this comes awfully close.

For all its muscular filmmaking, Martin Eden is most striking for its temporal blur and subtle anachronisms. As in Marcello’s documentaries, a straightforward narrative is complicated, fragmented, and enriched by snatches of pop music and interpolated archival footage.

While most contemporary period pieces are content to just vaguely express these ideas in service of some grander thematic terms, Martin Eden refreshingly works through its class politics in real-time; Marcello gives complete narrative agency to our titular protagonist, while still imbuing the ideas of his film with a palpable urgency.

It feels like some lost Italian masterpiece from the 1970s, unearthed from a locked vault after decades of gathering dust and slotted into the middle of a late De Sica/ mid-period Francesco Rosi triple feature.