To be an artist, to share your truest and most profound expressions, can be at once terrifying and cathartic. In “At Eternity’s Gate,” directed by Julian Schnabel, we witness van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) venturing into the heart of the Divine, in search of a new way to share the world through art.

The film starts with van Gogh being ejected from his own solo show for his work’s perceived ugliness. It is after this initial conflict that van Gogh meets Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac). The two artists have a discussion about searching for a “new kind of light” and a new vision to paint with, a conversation that prompts van Gogh’s journey into the French countryside, where he is plunged into depths of loneliness and despair while following his muse. An unnerving scene follows later in the film wherein van Gogh attacks a woman after she refuses to lay still for a portrait.

Dafoe’s resemblance to Van Gogh is uncanny, the many-times-lauded actor injects the role with a sublime madness that recalls his portrayal of other tortured souls, in particular, the king of suffering himself, Jesus Christ. In fact, the parallels between Van Gogh and Jesus are striking: men who were greatly misunderstood during their lifetime and not appreciated until after death; the two men were channelers of the divine, Van Gogh through his paintings and Christ through his teachings. In Dafoe’s performance, we see an artist who faces the extremes of joy, agony, ecstasy, and sorrow, intense emotions which he endured while sustaining his remarkable creative output (finishing 87 paintings over the course of 90 days).

Schnabel achieves what one could describe as the true promise of cinema by placing us directly into van Gogh’s perspective, shooting from a POV style on a handheld camera. He wants you to smell and taste every frame, building each image from the sound to the colors. It is the experiential nature and immediacy of his filmmaking that contours the viewer’s perspective of the flesh and spirit of Van Gogh’s paintings.

Because Schnabel pushes the boundaries of the camera even further than he did in Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was shot from the point of view from a man rendered mute and helpless by a stroke, the viewer experiences not only Van Gogh’s miserable loneliness but also the joy that Van Gogh found - so ably conveyed by Dafoe - in nature. Schnabel also brings something of what van Gogh brought to painting: filling the shots with a golden light that was at the core of Van Gogh’s works.

At the heart of the film is an argument in support of art-for-art's-sake. When asked by a priest, played by Mads Mikkelsen, why he paints, Dafoe looks dumbfounded. An answer cannot be given because the question is only simple to those who ask it. For artists dead and alive, the “why” is unimportant. They just do. Van Gogh was a visionary and this film is not shy about being an ode to the artistic quest of a genius.

While Schnabel’s film is very much of a piece with his previous works, like Before Night Falls, Basquiat, Diving Bell, et al, his bravura, he and Dafoe take the audience on an unusual but intoxicating odyssey; which takes the viewer even further into the mind and creative process of a master.

You can watch a trailer for the film here.