Not quite as smart as it needs to be, yet smarter than it may seem, Dom Hemingway is a timely film, and an unmistakable sign that Jude Law has the kind of bravura chops to stack up against anybody. It is also an antidote to Martin Scorsese’s recent The Wolf of Wall Street, which featured a similarly manic lead performance from Leonardo DiCaprio.

Both center on larger-than-life immoral crooks that have a kind of charisma belying their sliminess, and the two films embrace the kinetic fun surrounding these kinds of characters. But Wolf was widely criticized for not showing the consequences of that immorality, while Hemingway‘s second half is all about the inevitable bottoming out that self-styled, outsized immoralists will face when reality comes knocking.

The film achieves an impressive balance of Guy Ritchie-style comedic criminality and violent swagger with the hollowed out loneliness of what that kind of life really leads to, and the shift in tone works seamlessly. None of this, of course, would have been possible without Law’s total abandonment of ego, of committing completely to the over-the-top madcap highs and the grim lows.

Actually, the most audacious thing about the film, other than Law’s unprecedentedly unflattering performance, is the way it deftly weaves a critique of itself into its own DNA. The film is being marketed as a chance to see a famous actor known mostly for his romantic roles transformed into a violent, verbose man who leaves a trail of broken beer bottles, fatherless children, and broken noses in his wake. However, such people are not fondly remembered or celebrated—they spread misery and the only ones singing their praises are themselves.

At its core, Dom Hemingway is a closely observed study in the idiocy of self-mythologizing, of creating narratives about ourselves to help justify our more callous, selfish aspects. Since Dom is almost entirely callous and selfish, his self-mythologizing goes to dizzying heights, and a big part is spent in watching Dom feverishly trying to convince himself and those unlucky enough to be around him that he is some kind of contemporary legend.

In the first scene, we see Dom being fellated while he expounds loudly about the many ways that his penis is perfect, and he just keeps going and going, until it becomes obvious that anyone so obsessed with yelling about their impressive penis probably has an average one. Dom finishes without warning, and the woman casually wipes her mouth and walks off as if nothing has happened, rather than being rapturously changed for the experience of having been near such a legendary member.

This man is so below average, such a loser, that the only way he can function is to invent a ribald persona to play, and as the film goes on, we see how exhausted he is with this role, and how unimpressed everyone else is by the performance. That is what Dom Hemingway is really about.

The problem is that the film is not quite good enough at distancing itself from the kind of film it is commenting on, and too often it feels like just another passable addition to the canon of gritty British crime dramas with macho leads. It isn’t clear, for instance, if lazy lines passing for whisky-soaked wit like “I have the shittiest luck in the history of shitty luck” are meant to show how delusional Dom is for thinking that he’s funny, or an earnest attempt to show how quip-proficient its main character is.

At its worst, it feels like a failed attempt to recapture Ben Kingsley’s ferocious magic in Sexy Beast, but at its best, it is a surprisingly insightful comment on the deep loneliness that such a man would feel at the end of the day when he’s done acting superhumanly tough.

It does work as a piece of cinema in its own right, however. There are a handful of striking compositions, like a sprawling car crash filmed in a way that puts other cinematic car collisions to shame, somehow cringingly violent, absurdly funny, and oddly lovely all at once. And in the early scenes when Dom is all piss and vinegar, the camera moves with him in perfect sync, making him feel like a boxer having a go at the entire world. To top it all off, the film climaxes with perhaps the best use of a Pixies song (“Debaser”) in a movie since Fight Club, and that has to count for something.

The reason Dom Hemingway feels slighter than one would expect is that it is supposed to—the problem is that it is not quite clear enough about the intentional nature of its slightness. Overall, the attempt at genre criticism from within that very genre combined with the highly entertaining lead performance makes it a worthwhile watch.