Depp, meanwhile, plunges head-first into the part of John Wilmot, the second earl of Rochester, that most notoriously indelicate of poet-playwrights who was constantly falling in and out of favor with King Charles II (played by John Malkovich, who once tackled the Wilmot role on the Chicago stage).

By Wilmot's own admission, he is ''up for it, all the time,'' and discriminates not between men and women, but indulges in carnal distraction wherever he may find it. Here is a man so bored by life that he endeavors to obliterate it altogether through booze and sex. His appetite for sexual gratification appears unrelenting -- indeed, every line that escapes his lips is loaded with double entendres -- and yet the stage provided his sole source of passion.

''The theater is my drug, and my illness is so far advanced that my physic must be of the highest quality,'' he tells a young actress (Samantha Morton) in whom he sees particular promise, committing himself to training her personally. In a movie with more than its share of lusty embraces, it's significant that Wilmot and the actress' rehearsal sessions generate more steamy energy than any of the film's more overt sex scenes.

That choice marks one of the few directorial decisions Dunmore makes that actually serves the film. Otherwise, the movie feels like a rather misguided provocation. I applaud any film with the courage to present an imperfect character as its focus -- from their frailties we stand to learn more about ourselves than a conventional Hollywood hero could ever teach. However, what is most beguiling about The Libertine is that it allows Wilmot to self-destruct without ever giving us cause to care or relate.

Meanwhile, Dunmore subscribes to a most unfortunate aesthetic, in which the period is rendered through a murky green-gray haze. As the camera lilts deliriously through endless candlelit scenes, Stephen Jeffreys' over-crafted dialogue begins to sound like so much white noise. From time to time, a gem-like line shines from the squalor, but in general, it's merely the film's suffocating cynicism that registers.

There are few cinematic experiences more unpleasant than witnessing Wilmot's eventual undoing -- the silly sex farce he stages is one thing, but the syphilitic suffering is almost too much to bear. Like Quills (in which Doug Wright subjected the Marquis de Sade to similar scrutiny), the work seems torn between jealousy and judgment.

''I do not mean to upset people,'' Wilmot professes halfway through, ''but I have to speak my mind because what is in my mind is always more interesting than what is happening in the world outside my mind.'' In that line, Depp gives us cause to dislike not only Wilmot's character, but also the intellectual arrogance with which his story is so ineffectually told.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]