This attractive biopic is a hoot if you don't take it seriously, writes Donald Clarke.

THIS much-hyped study of the women who mopped up the young Dylan Thomas's effusions begins with a gorgeously unreal shot of Keira Knightley's face reimagined as if in an airbrushed pin-up. There's nothing much to the scene - Knightley, playing Vera Phillips, Thomas's first love, is singing to Londoners sheltering from the Blitz - but director John Maybury manages to make something weird and fantastic out of it.

That sequence goes some way to summing up the merits and demerits of this profoundly peculiar movie. Maybury, director of the fabulous Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, has taken a humdrum script by Sharman Macdonald (Keira's mum) and brought all his talents for surreal camp to bear upon it. The result is a beautifully framed, eccentrically edited mass of cinematic platitudes. It's truly lovely to look at, but you are always aware there's nothing much behind the screen.

Thomas enthusiasts seeking a dissection of the great man's psyche had best look elsewhere. The Edge of Loveshuffles Matthew Rhys's Dylan off into a corner to focus on the fiery relationship between Vera Phillips and Caitlin MacNamara, his indomitable wife. Caitlin was famously robust and charismatic, so, upon hearing that she is played by the perennially invisible Sienna Miller, you will realise that Maybury is not striving for documentary realism.

During the war years, Vera, married to an English officer named Killick, moved to the remote cottage in Wales, where the poet and his wife had retired to drink at one another. Here, if the film is to be believed, the two women wore artfully distressed hats from Banana Republic and took copious baths together. When Killick returned to discover the Bohemian layabouts squandering his money, he, not unreasonably, flew off the handle in dramatic fashion.

There are numberless things to dislike about this film. Cillian Murphy, convincingly English as Killick, is the only actor to create a character with any emotional purchase. The script (perhaps restrained by copyright restrictions from quoting too much Dylan verse) utterly fails to explain why we should care about the charmless layabouts exploiting Killick's generosity. And the appearance by Suggs from Madness as a hoity-toity cabaret singer breaks new ground in the field of deranged miscasting.

And yet. Thanks to Maybury's preternatural inability to deliver a dull image, The Edge of Lovedoes exert a delicious, bewitching hold throughout. Go and see it. Enjoy yourself. Then forget it ever existed.