It opens mid-binge: a Lamborghini the colour of cocaine, dwarves flung at a velcro bullseye for sport, a brass band and half-naked women marching through a trading floor that roars like a riot. Jordan Belfort is talking straight into the camera, and the first thing he does is correct the colour of his own car, because the truth is never quite as good as the sell. The Wolf of Wall Street runs three hours and never stops moving — a film about appetite that is itself ravenous, gorging on money, drugs, flesh and noise until you feel both exhilarated and a little sick.

Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives on Wall Street a wide-eyed beginner and is promptly initiated by Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), who lays out the whole racket over martinis with a chest-thumping hum that DiCaprio’s character will carry off like a war chant. The 1987 crash wipes him out; he resurfaces in a strip-mall boiler room hawking penny stocks to working people, discovers he can sell anything to anyone, and builds Stratton Oakmont — a pump-and-dump fraud factory dressed up as a brokerage, where the salesmen are feral and the commissions are obscene.

Scorsese directs it the way Belfort sells: fast, funny, shameless, addictive. He hands DiCaprio the camera to confess to, then cuts away the instant the explanation gets inconvenient (“but you don’t care about that”). Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing keeps the whole bacchanal at a sprint, Rodrigo Prieto’s camera prowls the trading floor like one more predator, and the wall-to-wall voiceover never lets the audience catch its breath. The centrepiece is pure physical comedy — Belfort, paralysed by expired Quaaludes, dragging his own dead body down a country-club staircase and into a Lamborghini — and DiCaprio plays it with the abandon of a silent-era clown.

He is matched at every turn. Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff is a needy, fluorescent-toothed lieutenant who’ll snort anything and married his own cousin; Margot Robbie, in the role that announced her to the world, plays Naomi as a woman who knows exactly what she is worth and exactly when the marriage curdles. Around them swarms a floor of howling salesmen, and Terence Winter’s script gives each of them just enough rope. McConaughey is gone after two scenes and somehow haunts the entire film.

The recurring charge against the film is that it glamorises the very greed it depicts, and Scorsese’s answer is to refuse to moralise on cue. There is no scene of the defrauded grandmother, no tidy lesson; the FBI agent who finally corners Belfort rides home alone on a grimy subway, the single unglamorous frame in three hours. The real indictment is saved for the last shot: Belfort, barely punished, reborn as a motivational guru, asking a roomful of strangers to sell him a pen — and the camera turning to study their faces, hungry, leaning in, ready to become him. The film holds the mirror up to the audience and lets it decide.

It is not flawless, and the flaws are inseparable from the method. Three hours of escalation is, by design, exhausting; the back half slackens exactly where the legacy of Scorsese’s own Goodfellas and Casino predicts it will, and the fourth-wall address and needle-drop momentum are a register he perfected decades ago rather than new ground. The victims stay offscreen, abstractions — which is the point, and also a limit: the film is so locked inside Belfort’s skull that the world he wrecks barely registers as real.

And yet it endures, because almost no one else could make excess this propulsive and this funny without losing the thread of disgust running underneath it. At seventy-one Scorsese delivered his most kinetic film, DiCaprio gave the loosest and bravest comic performance of his career, and the result is a satire of American hunger that keeps getting truer. The Wolf of Wall Street wants you to have the time of your life watching a man get away with it — and then to notice that you did.

Tags: martin scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, jonah hill, Matthew McConaughey, The Wolf of Wall Street