News

Making the classics hip for a new generation is a storytelling tradition nearly as embedded as the classics themselves: Screens and stages have been so flooded over the decades with updated, dressed-down interpretations of Shakespeare plays, or sundry Greek and Roman myths, that it’s tempting to label traditionalism the new revisionism. Even within this heavily tilled field, however, Esmé von Hoffman’s debut feature “Ovid and the Art of Love” feels eccentric and ambitious. The story of the ancient Roman poet Ovid, whose celebrated authorship of the “Metamorphoses” was followed by a much-debated banishment from Rome, hasn’t been overly mined by filmmakers: von Hoffman’s version, relocated to a semi-contemporary Detroit of concrete lots, college cliques and slam poetry nights, will be a curious introduction for some viewers.

This is an Ovid, then, who wears Converse chucks and a hoodie over his hessian robes — as one might just...