the rake's progress; "The Libertine" stars Johnny Depp as the ultimate man-about-town.(The White Countess)(Movie Review)

Byline: John Powers

Allow me to be frank," John Wilmot (Johnny Depp) warns the audience at the outset of Laurence Dunmore's The Libertine. "You will not like me." That doesn't mean we won't like watching him. For while there is much to abhor in this notorious poet and rakehell, Wilmot (also known as the Earl of Rochester) has fascinated everyone from King Charles II to Graham Greene. He makes Lord Byron look like a choirboy.

When the film begins, Wilmot is leaving his loyal wife, Elizabeth (Rosamund Pike), in the country and heading off to London to spend his days frittering away his literary gifts-chasing bawdy women and drinking as if life were one endless Irish wake. Such self-destructiveness distresses his protector Charles II, played with petulant amusement by John Malkovich, who exhorts him to write: "You're my literary giant." Instead, Wilmot devotes himself to transforming an unpopular young actress, Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton), into the queen of the London theater. Onstage, Barry does for him what life itself cannot: She makes him feel.

The Libertine is one of two holiday movies about fabled ladykillers (now, there's an unlikely trend). While Casanova, starring Heath Ledger, is a cheery, old-fashioned Hollywood romp, Dunmore's impressive debut offers an unsentimental portrait of a London whose coffee-stained hues and devouring shadows hint at the spiritual corruption that made Wilmot more famous for his licentiousness than for his art. What saves this from being a grim morality play is Depp, a dazzling chameleon whose sole flaw is that he hides himself so far inside his characters that we don't feel the humanity within. Wilmot's cynical ...