Pupi Avati’s schizophrenic drama stars Sharon Stone, Riccardo Scamarcio and Cristiana Capotondi.
For Davide Bias (Scamarcio), working at an ad agency and writing short stories in his free time, day-to-day life is challenging beyond a normal film protagonist’s wildest dreams. Nobody’s interested in his writing, his girlfriend’s (Capotondi) in love with someone else, and he’s taking pills for what he seems to have identified as obsessive compulsive disorder but to me seems more like schizophrenia, with a touch of bi-polar disorder thrown in to make it extra tragic.
I’m no doctor, and neither, apparently, are the screenwriters, but I think we could all agree that Davide is a mess. When his father, a famous B movie screenwriter dies, and Davide doesn’t even want to return to Rome from his home in Milan for the funeral. Their relationship has been “difficult” for a long time but he returns for his mom’s sake, but being there for her doesn’t stop him from making a big fuss and an unhappy diatribe at the church about what a bad father he’d had.
His father had been clearly a bad husband, in any case, and the funeral had already been tainted by a sobbing mistress’s eulogy, but the Mistress with the capital “M” was Ludovica, played by the almost comically dubbed Sharon Stone.
Stone plays a Canadian editor that has relocated to Italy and is interested in publishing Davide’s father’s autobiography, and Davide is drawn to the project too. He stops taking his pills, tells his girlfriend he’s not returning to Milan, and he shuts himself away in his father’s study.
I’d like to say I’m sure that Avati wasn’t going for campy melodrama in Un Ragazzo D’Oro, and if he was, he’s done a better job than if he’d been shooting for heart-rendering drama. Riccardo Scamarcio’s performance as the mentally unbalanced son with the cross to bear borders on the creepy, and Sharon Stone’s obviously channeling actresses from Fellini movies with inexplicable but amusing ironic glamour.
It’s a mentally unbalanced movie in need of its meds, so bad it’s good, and fun for all the wrong reasons.
Un Ragazzo D’Oro is one of the films that will be making the rounds in the US this spring with Italian Film Festival USA.
Cleveland: April 12, 3:00 p.m.
Indianapolis: April 25, 3 p.m.
Detroit: April 25, 5 p.m.
Milwaukee: April 24, 7:00 p.m.
Phoenix: April TBA,
Kansas City: April TBA,
St. Louis: April TBA,
I Love Italian Everything 
