As he introduced the world premiere of Nine, the film’s director, Rob Marshall, paid tribute to the late Anthony Minghella, whose last project was the screenplay. “We all feel the loss of this extraordinary man,” said Marshall. The film is dedicated to Minghella.

If you haven’t seen or don’t know the original musical, and if you are seduced by the spectacular trailers, you might expect Nine to be a glittering cavalcade of frouffed and bouffed leading ladies (Penélope Cruz and Nicole Kidman among them), prowling slinkily around leading man Daniel Day-Lewis. But Nine is one of those rare things: a sombre musical, as gritty as it is glittery.

The story of Day-Lewis’s tormented film director Guido Contini is based on Fellini’s 8½ and was first performed on Broadway in 1982, with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston.

Marshall draws richly on this theatrical DNA. His main stage is precisely that: a skeletal ruin acting as a backdrop for both sombre torch songs and razzle-dazzle ’em, spotlit showstoppers.

The film is set in the sharp-suited, zingy Italy of the mid-1960s. Kate Hudson’s Stephanie, a journalist desperate to bed Contini, sings a ritzy tribute to the era of “motor cars and coffee bars”. But the frustrated Contini doesn’t sleep with her and cannot find the right starting-point for his new film, his block a result of his many tangled relationships with women, which are played out spectacularly in fantasy sequences of song and dance. Your love of Nine will be heavily dependent on the suspension of belief that musicals typically demand.

The revelation is Marion Cotillard as Contini’s cheated-upon wife Luisa; she exquisitely embodies the pain of his rejection, the damage of his lies, and finally — in one of the film’s most stunning numbers — her defiant refusal to be his doormat, clad scantily, singing her pain and scorn to a raucous bar of men.

Cruz plays his mistress, Carla, with the same vixenish elan she possessed in Vicky Cristina Barcelona; one of the film’s few laughs (apart from the fabulous Judi Dench as Contini’s wise wardrobe mistress) comes when Carla blithely tells Contini she will wait for him to return “with her legs open”. Kidman is Claudia, Contini’s leading lady, high-voltage but ultimately — she tells him — not his idealised love object.

As Contini’s mother a startlingly smooth-skinned Sophia Loren is his link to his repressive past of beatings from priests: the story doesn’t disentangle her complicity with the priests’ cruelty, but emphasises her enduring love. The pop singer Fergie plays his tousled first object of desire.

Dench lets rip with a brilliant number at an imagined Folies Bergère and wishes — as we do when the film drags, as it certainly does — Contini would just get on and make his damned movie. The film doesn't burrow deeply into the relationships enough to justify his endless hand-wringing and head-gripping. But Day-Lewis is a master of agony and agonising (There Will Be Blood, My Left Foot) and slowly his questioning about creativity, intimacy and culpability coalesce to a convincing finale, which interrogates what Alan Bennett's latest play calls "the habit of art". The ladies reunite for a shimmering swansong, but Nine’s steely core proves more resonant than its surface sheen.

Editor's choice

• Sugababes — a band or a brand?
• Scorsese: ‘The emotional always comes first’
• Helena Bonham Carter: 'I'm not a dirty person'