Straight director takes aim at a queer life and misses but the miss succeeds finally in showing what’s most alien in the artist from today’s POV: total embedment in his own life and times. From behind thick glasses we watch Willem Dafoe’s weary mask of a face, waiting to be invited behind his eyes and into the space of an unfinished novel and an unmade film, making palpable his working life. “Narrative art is dead,” Pasolini intones, “and we are in mourning,” but his death does not obscure the truth of a life lived “loving / the world I hate.”