“You will not like me,” Johnny Depp says to camera with a sneer that suggests he will despise us if we do. Depp plays the Earl of Rochester — poet, playwright, debauchee, drunkard, defiler of wenches and The Libertine of the film’s title. This line of dialogue is lifted from his manifesto, a blistering prologue delivered as a warning to those about to enter Rochester’s world; the prologue itself is quoted word for word from the acclaimed play by Stephen Jeffreys on which Jeffreys himself has based his screenplay.

The story deals with the life of the notoriously depraved Earl who scandalised Restoration-era critics and goaded King Charles II (played here by an appropriately urbane John Malkovich) with pornographic satires of life at court, obscene verse and much roistering, carousing and wenching. Depp is terrific in the role, with a rock star’s lip- curled arrogance and a sexually predatory swagger. His entourage, including a pomaded and bewigged Johnny Vegas and the always excellent Tom Hollander, is a Greek chorus too soused to check their friend when Rochester inevitably goes too far.

But even the most die-hard dissolute has his weaknesses — and, for Rochester, love is a weakness.

The object of his affection is his theatrical protégé, the aspiring actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton), whose barbed wit matches that of the Earl, but whose ambition far surpasses his. It’s always intriguing to see what Morton will bring to a role, and here it’s an earthy honesty that diffuses some of the more theatrical and stylised tendencies of the script.

Quite rightly, Jeffreys has imported, untampered with, much of the ribald banter in the script from his play. There’s a grubby authenticity to both the language and the look of the film that is tremendous fun — King Charles’s spaniels defecate at will in the court and the foul-mouthed Rochester dispenses the poetic equivalent.

What has been altered is a key confrontation with the King over a play that Rochester has been commissioned to write.There is a changed end to the story, too, which now offers the Earl — crippled and disfigured by the pox and by the draconian treatments of the day — an opportunity for redemption.

The final third of the picture doesn’t live up to the bawdy promise of the beginning. Rochester’s decline is sudden and accelerated, his final magnanimous act starkly out of character. Still, it’s worth watching for the elegant writing, the spirited performances — and for Johnny Depp, naturally.

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