This might be John Maybury’s first feature film, but both he and his adopted style are nothing new. In the eighties he was one of the country’s so-called New Romantic film-makers, a name behind both the experimental hour-long video collage Remembrance of Things Fast, and, more famously, a clutch of celebrated pop-videos. He also worked extensively with Derek Jarman.

It’s that last that offers us a key into Love Is The Devil, Maybury’s impressive and fiercely impressionistic bio-pic of Francis Bacon. Or not bio-pic: because this is no The Agony and The Ecstasy. It’s not even Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo. Stylistically, as well as dramatically, it owes far more to Jarman’s eponymous 1986 study of Caravaggio in its refusal to address the accepted dynamics. Like Jarman, Maybury favours staged scenes and stylised sets: realism has little opening. And it’s worth getting to know Bacon the painter before venturing forth because you will not see any of his work on display (the Estate refused), and seldom does his on-screen personification have brush in hand, let alone apply pigment to canvass.

Instead, Love Is The Devil, adapted loosely from Daniel Farson’s biography, is in essence a love story. That between the ferocious and dipsotic Bacon - arguably this country’s greatest painter since Turner - and George Dyer, the burglar who crashed through his skylight one evening in 1964. That, literally, is Maybury’s starting point. Or rather, the incident occurs during the titles; the story actually starts with Bacon being welcomed at a prestigious Paris retrospective even while Dyer is dying of a drink and drugs overdose back in their hotel bathroom.

On a clichéd level it’s easy to see the attraction. Both men were gay, with Bacon an upper-class masochist, Dyer the working-class sadist. The sex scenes are implied (we see preparations: the creaking leather belt Dyer wraps about his fist), but details are scarcely necessary. Maybury likes to parallel but never overplay comparison to the art. Come into my bed, Bacon tells Dyer on their first meeting, and you can have anything you want.

Derek Jacobi, who surely no longer financially needs make films like this, is astonishing as Bacon. Physically the resemblance is uncanny. By reputation the artist could be both generous and cruel, and that’s certainly where Jacobi pitches his camp. Dyer, played with self-effacing abandon by Daniel Craig (Our Friends In The North), is a man on the edge, never at home in this rarefied world but besotted all the same. Bacon, the film suggests, fed vampirically off of Dyer’s vulnerability, his reaction to news of the suicide deathly cold. There’s good support too from Jarman regulars Karl Johnson and Tilda Swinton, the latter all but unrecognisable as Muriel Belcher, and a noteworthy and surprisingly understated score from Japan’s Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Love Is The Devil, however, remains emotionally uninvolving. It’s a film about Francis Bacon, after all, and no one, maybe not even George Dyer, managed to break through to what really made him tick. What Maybury has made is a beautiful, fascinating, compelling sketch (the film is subtitled ‘Study for A Portrait of Francis Bacon’) of a fascinating and compelling man, but seldom, like Bacon, does it show us any beauty.