Claiming that your film is based on a true story is usually a way of legitimating the technicolour dreamcoat you’re about to spin out of your meagre yarn. Martin Scorsese, however, happens to have chosen a story of such wild debauchery that any half-hearted claims to veracity are unnecessary. The Wolf of Wall Street retells the story of Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio), rags-to-riches-stockbroker-cum-money-launderer extraordinaire, with what I imagine is shockingly little exaggeration. Or, for that matter, glamorisation: accusations that the film legitimises psychotic behaviour are hard to square with the film itself, which, though buoyed up by comedy, leaves nobody laughing in the end.

The film is shameless in its excess. You want girls? Have ten, fully naked. Drugs? Have Matthew McConaughey whipping out a pot of cocaine at lunch as if snuff were still fashionable. At first, the film’s persistent overstepping of the mark is funny, even sexy, and it is while the going is still good that full-time funnyman Jonah Hill (playing Belfort’s business partner Donnie Azoff) comes into his own – though, thanks to an extended clip in the trailer, McConaughey’s chest-beating cameo will also go down in the annals of its funniest moments.

But the film comes to overdose on its debauchery, as it repeats the senseless cycle of money/drugs/women ad nauseam. What begins as comedy (albeit of the rough-and-ready variety) gradually migrates, in a Fear and Loathing sort of way, into the realm of the sickening. The scene that perhaps epitomises this is Belfort’s attempt to drive home after he and Azoff overdose on out-of-date pills; it treads a terrifying tightrope between slapstick and grotesque.

Though perhaps the point of the film is its unabashed superficiality, there is some paltry attempt on Scorsese’s part at overlaying the emptiness of Wall Street wealth with the faded dream of pastoral hard-graft: ‘I built it’, DiCaprio muses, admiring his country estate. Belfort’s rousing speech to the staff of Stratton Oakmont, which has its audience collapse into fits of worshipful tears and shouts, borders on born-again Christianity fare. Belfort’s story has a great tragedy in it – an epic fall from grace – yet our nerves are worn so thin after three hours of hijinks that we are almost grateful for its long overdue end.

Ultimately, we leave feeling as unenlightened as we came. The Wolf resembles Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers in its sheer heartlessness: multiple deaths produce barely a flicker on its radar, marriages are destroyed, friendships betrayed, men brought down from the dizzy heights of stock exchange success to the washed up shores of motivational speaking, and yet the heart of the film is so jet black that it is hard to feel anything other than apathetic.