FILM: The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)

The story: The true-life rise and fall of New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonard DiCaprio).

Biopics are typically dramas, but the first two thirds of Martin Scorsese's picture are flat-out black comedy. Occasionally, through all the wild work parties, this nudges the gross-out genre, and there are moments that feel improvised (mostly situations involving Jonah Hill's insanely deranged sidekick to DiCaprio's Belfort). It's a movie of pieces, of performances and cameos from the likes of Matthew McConaughey (still sporting his Dallas Buyers Club weight loss) in a memorable scene that sets the tone for the kind of behaviour Belfort goes beyond later.

The question about this movie was: does it celebrate Belfort? It's told through his eyes and based on his book, and even features a cameo from the man himself, so there's an element of complicity there. But that complicity is obvious, so it's up to the audience to make up their mind about who he is, and the way it finishes hardly makes him an aspirational figure.

In terms of telling the story, a choice has been made to sideline the detail of the finance that makes movies like Margin Call so interesting, and focus on the man and his lifestyle. (DiCaprio will often start to explain the finance, then cast it aside as too boring - what screenwriters call 'hanging a lantern' on a choice.) However, the film never cuts deeply enough into Belfort's psychology to present a truly revealing portrait, so most of what we're left with is comedy.

Comedy is a great way to keep an audience entertained, though, and it sustains much of the film's three-hour length. In a way, all of Belfort's craziness is only funny because you're held at one remove from his intimate psychology; and that distance allows for a judgement, too, because there's no attempt made to make you empathise with him; this isn't Henry Hill in Goodfellas. So, if you want to make a morally valid portrait of a seemingly immoral man, I think this is a decent way to do it.