If only the rest of the movie could keep up with Depp’s astonishing ability to dominate the screen and make you his cinematic bitch. Director Laurence Dunmore, in his feature film debut, relies a tad too much on low-light shooting and the resultant graininess to signify Wilmot’s corruption and the general depravity of the culture of his world. Sure, the script (Jeffreys adapted his own play) features such delicious bon mots as Wilmot’s “In Paris, fornication with strangers in the street is compulsory,” but the film as a whole never gels enough to make you feel like you’re visiting such a depraved place. There’s one scene that manages to overcome the almost unavoidable conviction that sex, the enjoyment of sex, and an appreciation for jokes about sex were invented in the 20th century -- a sense that even the most enlightened and educated tend often cannot shake -- and that is, admittedly, a pretty hot scene in which Wilmot and his wife, the luscious heiress Elizabeth Malet (Rosamund Pike: Doom, Pride & Prejudice) engage in some very naughty and very nice hanky panky in their carriage. But mostly, there’s not enough genuine raunch in The Libertine’s bawdiness to rise above the level of transitory shock for shock’s sake.

Wilmot was certainly into shock, and there is a certain pleasure to be had in the film’s rather gleeful depiction of the joy he took in tweaking even his benefactor, King Charles II (John Malkovich: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Johnny English, doing his fairly standard but still effective weirdo routine). Charles imagined he would have his Shakespeare in Wilmot, a talent who would define and embody Charles’s reign as the Bard did for Elizabeth, and perhaps he did: Wilmot wrote a grand opera for the king that was pretty racy.

Okay, let’s be clear here: Wilmot’s play features naked folk-dancing women swinging giant dildoes around, and dwarves riding even more enormous phalluses across the stage, and it’s fairly hilarious to see Wilmot’s vision brought to life in Dunmore’s film. But Wilmot was making a statement about Charles and the state of his kingdom and the culture he was supposedly the primary influence on. And though there’s a faint impression that Dunmore and Jeffreys are straining to draw some parallel between Wilmot’s commentary and our contemporary culture -- and, indeed, what would be the point of The Libertine at all if there were not some relevance for today? -- it’s not enough, because what that parallel might be is never explored. You’re left wondering why they bothered at all.

You intuit, too, that there’s perhaps something important hovering under the relationship Wilmot forces himself into with the actress Elizabeth Barry (the always extraordinary Samantha Morton: Code 46, In America) -- it’s not a romantic or sexual relationship, or at least not primarily, but one of teacher and student, as he pushes her toward her own discovery of what it means to be a truly great actress. Maybe it’s meant to have something to do with the connection between art in all its many forms and the basest human urges, a suggestion that to make art is not to engage in something rarefied and abstruse but something primeval and vital to survival?

But that’s just me grasping at straws, struggling to find something that isn’t there. When Wilmot says things like “I am the cynic of our golden age,” I long to be able to connect that to our world today. And I can’t.