The director John Maybury is home again after a brief, uncomfortable stint in Hollywood territory directing the supernatural thriller The Jacket. And home for Maybury is with the drink-sodden dissolute people in down-at-heel dives and sleazy Soho drinking dens where bohemians and artists mingle with whores and thieves.

It’s a milieu that he evoked exquisitely in his biopic of Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil. His fascination with self-destructive genius, hedonism, heartbreak and Olympic-level boozing continues unabated with his latest film, The Edge of Love. The film explores the poet Dylan Thomas’s relationships with two women, set against the backdrop of the Second World War. At least, that’s what you assume the film is about — but what soon becomes clear is that Thomas (played with a petulant sneer by Matthew Rhys) is not the focus. It’s the enduring, turbulent friendship between the women, Thomas’s wife Caitlin MacNamara (Sienna Miller) and his childhood sweetheart Vera Philips (Keira Knightley), that drives the movie.

Using similar techniques to those he employed in Love is the Devil, Maybury fractures and distorts images, suggesting splintering bonds and fragile mental states. It’s a handsomely photographed film; both the production and the costume design are spot-on, evoking an appropriately free-spirited squalor.

Maybury makes a 1940s pin-up icon out of Knightley. A nightclub singer, Vera is painted with jewel-hued stage lights. There’s something aloof and unearthly about her — no wonder Thomas jealously desires her and Caitlin is fascinated by her. Vera’s beau, a handsome soldier called William (Cillian Murphy), pursues her with a tenaciousness that eventually wins her over. The earthy Caitlin, meanwhile, is vibrant, wild and sexy. There’s an edge of recklessness and danger to her personality that means that her relentless pursuit of good times is tinged with desperation. Miller brings a damaged intensity to her performance — Caitlin’s desolate anguish when she realises that her husband and her friend have betrayed her is uncomfortably raw and messy. The warm, instinctive connection between the two women makes their friendship as intense as any love affair. Less convincing is the idea that surly, manipulative Dylan Thomas could have exerted such a hold on these feisty women.

15, 110mins

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