"I sleep with other women because I am a poet. I feed off life," offers celebrated scribbler Dylan Thomas (Rhys) when confronted about his many infidelities.

As a justification for betraying your wife and mother of your son, it's pretty feeble stuff. But this is Dylan Thomas, who, in director John Maybury's overwrought menage a quatre, is a pain in the artist.

It's 1941 and an impecunious, artistically frustrated Thomas is working on anti-Nazi propaganda films for the government - "writing poems about barrage balloons."

A chance meeting in a smoky boozer reintroduces him to childhood sweetheart, bomb shelter chanteuse Vera (Knightley), who gamely fends off his seductively romantic overtures.

What she doesn't know is that Thomas is married to (and has a child by) Caitlin (Miller), a bra-less, chain-smoking free spirit who's not averse to performing knicker-less cartwheels across the saloon bar.

Surprisingly, when Caitlin and Vera are eventually introduced they hit it off, despite the former's suspicions that the darkly charismatic Dylan's feelings for Vera are stronger than they might appear.

Enter Captain William Killick (Murphy), a straightforward Tommy who zeroes in on Vera and persuades her to tie the knot by virtue of his, well, virtue.

Director John Maybury, who also worked with Knightley in The Jacket, claims the focus is the close bond forged by the feisty women...but what comes across most strongly is the sheer nastiness of Thomas.

Coming on like a truculent Shane Ritchie, he displays no saving graces and the upstanding Killick could be forgiven if he were to hand the lily-livered, jotter-blotter over to the SS.

After some impressive sequences in a Blitz-scarred London (nightclub crooner Suggs of Madness cops one during a bombing raid), the action relocates to the coast and a thorough basting in Welsh melancholia.

The final twist does pack a punch - a shell-shocked Killick laying into Thomas and the stay-at home sycophants who sneer at those seeing real action.

But by then you've rather lost interest in bed-hopping antics and their grim repurcussions and are praying for Vera's own emotional armistice.

Tim Evans