Portrait of the artist as a cruel man.

Those of us who cannot afford to buy art take endless pleasure in entertainments that portray artists as unworthy of the money we can't give them. From Lust for Life to I Shot Andy Warhol, artists are shown as emotional adolescents who create their own rules--mopey, mercurial, obsessive, enamored of the brawling hoi polloi, and noncommittal in affairs of the heart. "Artists are bizarre, fixed, cold," sang Seurat's lover Dot in Sunday in the Park With George. And And that was a compliment.

If she pined after Francis Bacon instead, she might have downgraded the "cold" to "cruel." This is a man who, upon finding his lover unconscious on the floor, coolly checks the fellow's breath with a compact mirror and then flops in a chair to begin the tedious wait for him to stir. This is a man who watches his lover toss in the agony of a nightmare rather than wake him up.

John Maybury's Love Is the Devil is a nihilist's wet dream, a portrait of the artist as an aging man without a redemptive bone in his body. As played with poisoned fangs by Derek Jacobi, Bacon is a prince of darkness who has constructed an inverted world in which, as one friend says, "no good deed goes unpunished." A public sadist and a bedroom masochist, Bacon shudders with orgasmic pleasure at the taste of a boxer's blood on his face or the tragic spectacle of the Odessa Steps massacre in The Battleship Potemkin.

Love Is the Devil zeroes in on Bacon's destructive relationship with George Dyer, a hunky, unsophisticated thief with whom Bacon traded a home and hefty allowances for modeling rights and kinky sex. (For a change, the artist's muse is not of the opposite sex, a convention of the genre that even gay writer Christopher Hampton couldn't resist in Carrington.) Dyer (a devastating Daniel Craig) is a rough-hewn angel doomed from the moment he falls, quite literally, from the skies and into Bacon's life.

"Welcome to the concentration of camp? says Bacon as he introduces his new boyfriend into his vipers' nest of drinking buddies, and the Nazi resonance is altogether apt. Bacon and his grotesque circle annihilate everyone around them as well as each other: They are grown-up versions of the little monsters who disemboweled cats in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. This "twilight world of unhappy poofs" perfectly embodies the spirit of horror-equals-pleasure that informed Bacon's aesthetic.

Maybury was denied access to the paintings by the artist's estate, a lucky happenstance as it resulted in a stunning deployment of slow-motion, fisheye-lens, and fun-house-mirror effects to re-create the disturbing mood of Bacon's canvases. The result is perhaps the most sensual evocation of an artist's milieu since John Huston's dazzling nightlife tableaux for the opening of Moulin Rouge.

But Maybury's trendily impressionistic structure of short, time-hopping scenes (the film is subtitled Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon) is thin camouflage for the film's basic cliche. For all its visual elan, this is yet one more take on the heartless artist and his neglected muse. As it bangs home the ironic contrast between the public acclaim and the private tortures, Maybury's film eventually collapses under the weight of its redundancy. I'd trade all of Love Is the Devil's gorgeous cruelties for a single shot of Bacon trapped in the purgatory of a supermarket checkout line, waiting for the manager to bring the override key.

Stuart is theater critic and senior film writer for Newsday.