So a painter, a priest and their paisan partisan walk into a movie…

That’s the hackneyed set-up of “The Big Fake,” a fictional, skips-over-a-lot-of-the-good-stuff Italian heist thriller about a real life art forger who came to fame during Italy’s turbulent, violent, kidnapping-crazed 1970s.

The real forger’s odyssey is odd enough, climaxing with an epic bank robbery in the ’80s. In “Big Fake” (“Il falsario” in Italian) director Stefano Lodovichi (Netflix’s “The Trial”) and screenwriter Sandro Petraglia (“The Best of Youth”) throw our anti-hero into everything from mob intrigues to the political chicanery that went on behind the scenes of the Red Brigade’s kidnapping of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

Three pals from the provinces — painter Toni (Pietro Castellitto), priest Vittorio (Andrea Arcangeli) and tough-guy steelworker Fabione (Pierluigi Gigante) set out for the big city where Toni expects to be recognized as a great painter. But his ominous voice-over narration on the day of their departure speaks of “the day that I died” (in Italian, or dubbed into English).

The object lesson of the cinematic sermon he gives in “Big Fake” is “To get where you want go, what are you willing to do?”

He starts to figure out just how far when he meets art dealer Donata (Giulia Michelini) who notes his talent but dismisses him as a ‘figurative’ (representational) artist in an abstract world.”

Toni will never find traction with his realistic potraits and the like.

But when she spies his version of Bernini’s “Self Portrait as a Young Man,” she sees another use for his talent. He can “copy anybody,” he brags. So let’s see how you do in faking Modigliani, Monet or other early 20th century painters.

The script seriously shortchanges the painting part of the picture. Donata knows art and which artists are easiest to pass off with this or that “lost” masterpiece. We see little of Toni’s “talent” with a brush and there’s little mention of so much as adding a bit of age to the paintings — just the frames.

What the story is more focused on is seriously-unscrupulous Toni’s encounters with the Italian underworld. This mobster needs a fake passport. That one wants a wall-covering copy of “Napoleon Crossing the Alps.”

We see Toni steal bicycles and cheat on Donata and deliver paintings by modern masters in a mere week’s time. It isn’t long before the government operator known as “The Tailor” (Claudio Santamaria) notices and commissions him to fake kidnapping messages from the notorious Red Brigades, who have taken the country’s prime minister hostage.

And it isn’t long after that cocky Toni is the last to figure out he’s in over his head.

The story pays scant attention to Father Vittorio’s dreams of rising in the Vatican heirarchy — we see the poor priest get his first taste of haute cuisine, and fear the (not quite choir-boy-raping) worst — and Fabione’s deep dive into the Red Brigades, who were in open conflict with various fascist factions, many of them deeply embedded in the post-Mussolini state.

The parade of mobsters who pass by are as important as the suggestions that this character looks like that one, as foreshadowing is laid on thick and heavy.

We know the moment someone says “Don’t do anything stupid” that something stupid will be done.

The politics are murky as the story hints at the dark forces within the government who wanted to manipulate the shocking kidnapping of Moro to their own advantage. There’s a mini-series worth of intrigue and action stuffed into a 110 minute film.

Most everything interesting and cool is given short shrift. Toni narrating his story tees up one new wrinkle or blast of foreshadowing after another with few of them developed to any degree.

The climactic heist, like the art forgery, signature copying and fake ransome notes or “memoirs,” are just something Toni can do by instinct.

Castellitto has a certain rogueish dash, but the script doesn’t flesh out the character or explain his drive. And with everybody else even less developed, this fictional “fantasty” about the Moro kidnapping era never develops a heartbeat.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Giulia Michelini,
Andrea Arcangeli, Pierluigi Gigante and Claudio Santamaria

Credits: Directed by Stefano Lodovichi, scripted by Sandro Petraglia. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56