In 'The Wolf of Wall Street,' Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, the celebrated crook of the 1990s who prided himself on his ability to sell anything and did in fact swindle investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Martin Scorsese's epic-scale comedy of criminality, adapted by Terence Winter from Mr. Belfort's book of the same name, is selling three hours of incessant shouting and sensationally bad behavior-mud wrestling without the mud that includes drugs, booze, debauchery, degeneracy and dwarf-throwing. It's meant to be an entertaining, even meaningful representation of the penny-stock maestro's life and times. But I couldn't buy it, and couldn't wait for the hollow spectacle to end.

That's no knock on Mr. DiCaprio, who throws himself, heart and soul, into a character with deep deficits in both departments. Let's stipulate that his extravagant embodiment of excess is extremelyskillful and very funny, and put other stipulations on record as well.

Jonah Hill, equipped with phosphorescent teeth and a manic affect, is often hilarious as Jordan's partner in the sleazy firm of Stratton Oakmont. So is Matthew McConaughey in a madcap soliloquy on masturbation and the need to stay relaxed. The film does full justice to its denizens' devotion to cocaine, Quaaludes and heroin, and to morphine, which Jordan takes 'because it's awesome.' The Scorsese touch is everywhere in evidence: swirling set pieces (Stratton Oakmont's boiler room, full of rabid brokers, as a Roman bacchanal), spectacular camera moves (Rodrigo Prieto was the cinematographer), and all of it heightened and sharpened by Thelma Schoonmaker's editing. Some of the settings are enjoyable, up to a point, for their tacky sumptuousness: I liked the trashing of a Lamborghini Countach. And sharp-witted scenes do play out from time to time on a human scale. In one of them, a couple of FBI agents engage the wily Jordan in a game of cat-and-rat.