A biopic that recounts Battiato as a thinker and inner traveler between music, rigor and silence
Talking about Franco Battiato means measuring yourself with a figure who has always defied categories. Popular and experimental, ironic and ascetic, profoundly Italian and absolutely cosmopolitan: any attempt to reduce it to a formula risks betraying its spirit. Franco Battiato’s long journey chooses to address this complexity avoiding the most common shortcut of the contemporary biopic: that of the linear, reassuring story, built through the accumulation of episodes and successes.
Certainly the most intriguing part of the biopic directed by Renato De Maria (Battiato is effectively played by Dario Alta) is that of the arrival in Milan from Sicily in the seventies. He is a Battiato who experiments with the future, moves on the edge of the avant-gardeproduces music that is inaccessible and beautiful at the same time. Flashes of genius inspired in part by Karlheinz Stockhausen before his life changes (the move to Tunisia to study Arabic) and his artistic approach. The images on the walls of Milan are legendary, portraying him with a dazzling 70’s look in an advertising campaign (created by Gianni Sassi) as a testimonial for Busnelli sofas.
The figure of the mother, the non-existent relationship with the father, the Milanese meetings with Giorgio Gaber and Ombretta Colli, the difficult relationships with the record companies, the evolution of the inner life, the personal and spiritual crises. In The Long Journey all this is present, including the performance in the Vatican in front of John Paul II.
The part of the film that captures the great success thanks to The Master’s Voice is rich and successful, an album of seven songs, all hit singles (see Summer on a solitary beach and Permanent Center of Gravity). Ultimately De Maria’s film chooses a specific path: rather than rebuilding a career, try to tell an internal trajectory. And for the most part it succeeds.
The long journey does not show the last years of life, instead it stops at La cura (1996), the phenomenal song with which Franco Battiato manages to express the absolute without rhetoricmaking the promise of care an act of awareness and not of possession.
The film will be in theaters on February 2, 3 and 4, 2026 as a special event for Nexo Studios
