Drunk, Randy, Jealous and Poetic

Booze and jealousy make a toxic cocktail, one that’s heavily imbibed with much self-lacerating gusto in the grim British drama “The Edge of Love.” A fiction inspired by fact and more than a little fancy, the film examines the relationship between the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas and Vera Phillips, a childhood friend whose husband, shortly after returning home from World War II, came close to shooting the poet, the poet’s wife and some others to smithereens with a machine gun, all while shouting, “You’re nothing but a lot of egoists!”

He had a point, if Thomas and his set were as unwaveringly self-involved and tiresome as this lot. None are more tiresome than Thomas himself (Matthew Rhys), one of those ghastly artist-monsters of which the movies are so fond. To judge from this film and “Love Is the Devil,” his far superior 1998 biographical portrait of the painter Francis Bacon, the director John Maybury is firmly in thrall to the idea of the artist-monster, which is why both play out somewhat like horror movies. The difference is that while Bacon’s unhappy life and haunted paintings offered fertile ground for Mr. Maybury’s dark imaginings, the story here, plucked from Thomas’s life and embellished, proves almost entirely devoid of interest.

Mr. Maybury’s attempt to tart up the story visually suggests that he knows just how banal the material is. The story chugs to a start during the London Blitz in 1940, just as Vera (Keira Knightley), a torch singer, starts flashing her big, bright-white, distinctly nonperiod British teeth at her old friend Dylan. From the moony look in his eyes, he has a thing for her, though it takes time — and a late, teary revelation — to understand the nature of his feelings. Part of the problem is that the screenplay by Sharman Macdonald (Ms. Knightley’s mother) tries to wrest something profound from his bond with Vera, even as it fails to convince that the bond, woman or even the poet are worthy of all this attention.

Ms. Knightley works hard to make Vera rise to her centerpiece function, but she doesn’t yet have the ability to dig into a character without greater support from the script and her director. She certainly gets little help from Mr. Maybury, who mostly seems interested in her as a pliable object, a mannequin he can pose and paint. (Her face looks eerily like a tinted period photograph in some of the early scenes.) She’s best in her exchanges with a very fine, persuasively vulnerable Sienna Miller, who plays Thomas’s wife, Caitlin. Though the women, who are both paraded in states of undress before the camera, come across more like naughty schoolgirls than racy bohemians, they bring warmth and tenderness to their scenes together.

Such emotional colorations are not necessary to every story, but it helps to have a hint of the human when you’re trying to tell a love story or four: Dylan loves Vera, who loves him in turn and perhaps Dylan’s wife, though she’s also smitten with her own trigger-happy husband, William (a detached Cillian Murphy, popping in and out). Mr. Maybury’s visual style — the nicotine-brown color palette, the ugly gashes of red, the distorted and fractured image plane — suggests that he takes a gloomy view of affairs of the heart. A sequence in which he cuts back and forth between a woman giving birth and a soldier having a limb hacked off suggests he doesn’t have much use for those slabs of meat called human beings, either.

“The Edge of Love” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.) Bloody battleground and home-front violence, and a little nudity.

THE EDGE OF LOVE

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by John Maybury; written by Sharman Macdonald, based on an idea by Rebekah Gilbertson and the books “A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow” by David N. Thomas and “Personal Sketch of Vava and Personal Sketch of Papa” by Esther Killick; director of photography, Jonathan Freeman; edited by Emma E. Hickox; music by Angelo Badalamenti; production designer, Alan MacDonald; produced by Ms. Gilbertson and Sarah Radclyffe; released by Capitol Films and BBC Films. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

WITH: Keira Knightley (Vera Phillips), Sienna Miller (Caitlin Thomas), Cillian Murphy (William Killick) and Matthew Rhys (Dylan Thomas).