How Lily James and Joe Keery Became Old Hollywood Icons in ‘Finally Dawn’

“Weren’t you shocked?” Saverio Costanzo has a smile on his face as he asks me about Joe Keery’s suave, delicate performance in Finally Dawn, the epic Italian film which world premiered in Venice over the weekend before making its North American debut days later in Telluride. Writer-director Costanzo, fresh off the long trip from the Lido to the Rockies, admits to feeling a little jet-lag from a Mountain Village restaurant on Sunday afternoon, but still gets giddy when the Stranger Things star comes up in conversation. “He was always smiling, he had an allure,” Costanzo says of Keery. “Cary Grant—he reminded me of this kind of man.”

Keery is one of the many unusually compelling ingredients in Finally Dawn, a portrait of ‘50s Rome that contains elements of everything from Costanzo’s My Brilliant Friend to last year’s Babylon to the work of Federico Fellini. It smashes together Italian ingénues with global stars, gigantic set-pieces with intimate character drama, a dark vision of a historical turning point with a rollicking, unyielding narrative of self-discovery. Among the more divisive titles in this year’s Venice Film Festival, Finally Dawn has a lot on its mind, unafraid of big swings or to soak in a little melodrama—or to cast a charming TV star untested in a film of this scope in a pivotal dramatic role.

Costanzo cast Keery and Emmy nominee Lily James as imagined, glamorous Hollywood legends of the period who enter the orbit of our doomed heroine, Mimosa (newcomer Rebecca Antonaci), a sheltered young Italian woman primed for a small, safe, ordinary life—only for fate to intervene. Finally Dawn opens in familiar territory for Costanzo, a kind of naturalistic and fizzy account of two inseparably close girls taking on the world with a wide-eyed innocence. Mimosa and her older sister love movies, and decide to audition as extras in a swords-and-sandals epic going into production in their city. “I felt like, ‘Oh my God, am I doing My Brilliant Friend again?’” Costanzo cracks, referencing the beloved Elena Ferrante adaptation he’s helmed over multiple seasons. “I believe you have to start the next thing from where you were landed. It was a way to get from there to somewhere else.”

And he certainly goes somewhere else here. Mimosa lands the extra job over her relatively poised sister, and is thrust into a dizzying and disturbing Hollywood machine. She is paralyzed by the presence of her idol, James’s Josephine Esperanto, a diva in the mold of Joan Crawford, and her onscreen crush, Keery’s Sean Lockwood, a kind of heartthrob in waiting. “Rome was an American kind of city at that time—Americans saved Italy from the Nazis and then from there they occupied Rome,” Costanzo says. “Americans were everything for Romans, for Italians. They were like Gods.”

The energy of Finally Dawn shifts in line with Mimosa’s evolution, from aspirational to unsettling. Her story is based on Wilma Montesi, a 21-year-old who was found murdered in Rome, leading to sensational news coverage, in 1953. The crime was never solved but is believed to have touched powerful entities, show business included. “Fellini used to say that it was the end of innocence for Italy because from that moment, everything changed,” Costanzo says. Appropriately, then, Finally Dawn takes on that emotional arc, and ostensibly references Fellini in structure—particularly La Dolce Vita and Nights of Cabiria—while evolving into its own kind of unique, hedonistic elegy, imagining what may have been the wild last day in this woman’s life.

“The greatness of this film lies, as far as I’m concerned, in renewing the invitation to desire even when it’s not worth it,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty). “One cannot help but imagine the future, the beautiful life, as a mythical illustration. Therefore, Costanzo’s work ceases to be a film about a bygone era and becomes a necessary hymn to the life of all of us and, above all, of the young people. Hoping, imagining, desiring, crossing a night to see the sunrise is still what one cannot do without.”