Johnny appears at the beginning of Naked with no preface, no history, and no justification. He looks like he’s in his forties, but he’s not even 28. He rapes a woman—although it might be rape or simply mercenary sex that gets out of hand—steals a car and makes his way to London, where he ingratiates himself with Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), flatmate of an old girlfriend of his. From the way he talks to her—most of his speech consists of barked obscenities, barbed aphorisms and snide disparagements—we wonder how he could have ever entertained a relationship with anyone. There is another girl living in the flat as well, Louise (Lesley Sharp), a sad-sounding, doughy-faced woman who seems to have pulled out of something akin to whatever nosedive Johnny fell into, only to founder along aimlessly.

Johnny has education and intelligence and wit, but all of it has failed to give him a life worth living. He garnishes his sentences with literary references—chaos theory, Nostradamus’s quatrains, Buddhist scripture, the Bible—not to draw other people in, but to shut them out. There is nothing he sees around him that he wants to partake in except maybe to watch other people destroy themselves. Humanity is fair game for the sake of his survival. Sophie he sees as an easy lay; the last thing he wants to do is “get to know her,” when unfortunately Sophie is the sort of simpleminded person who thinks they are a great deal more interesting than they actually are. Louise only exists for him as a target for attacks on her semblance of normality: his presence reminds her how close she was, or is, to ending up like him.

When Johnny does try to connect with others, he chooses people that it would seem he doesn’t have a chance in hell of getting through to: a drug-addled young man and his hapless girlfriend, or a stolid night watchman who is as far removed from Johnny’s misery as possible. He talks to them in the same wild-eyed tone as a street preacher, ruminating about Apocalypse and a universe of wonders, tries to break through their incomprehension or indifference through sheer force of will. Again and again, until I had to ask: Is he doing it for them, or for himself—to prove to himself he’s really not that far gone and disconnected? Maybe it is simple masochism: he knows he is doomed to connect, and does it anyway to prove to himself he is right.

Two scenes in particular bring this home. The first is the sequence with the girl and the boyfriend. Both have gotten lost, and both bump into Johnny at different times during the same long night. Johnny goes out of his way to be accommodating to each of them, to pair them back up with each other, and even make sure the girl has something in her stomach. He pities them, possibly because they don’t even has his veneer of intelligence as protection, and pities her more than him because he had all the money and ran off. Then they’re reunited, and Johnny watches gloomily as they shrill and strike at each other. Reunited, thanks to him, but to what end?

The second sequence, much longer and more troubling, involves Johnny and the night watchman, Brian. He is like what Johnny might have ended up as, perhaps, if Johnny had decided to “go straight” instead of letting himself fall. The guard takes pity on Johnny and lets him stay the night in an unused office building, but only on the condition that he not look at him: “You’re invisible; I have to be seen. If you’re seen, I’m out of a job.” Brian’s job is his cocoon, and Johnny is the first person to enter it in decades. The guard has his own trepidations and dark places, but he has learned to internalize them, to smother them quietly instead of letting them rule his life. The guard is at least successful in the sense that he is functional, but against someone like Johnny he has no real defenses.

Johnny’s misery is contrasted with another character, Jeremy (Greg Cruttwell), the landlord for the building where the girls live. Jeremy has money and a comfortable life, but seethes with a kind of Nietzschean self-loathing: he plans on enjoying everything he has until he’s forty and then killing himself. “Life is for pleasure,” he says at one point, but he never looks like he’s having any fun, and all of his pleasures consist of humiliation and pain. He goes into Louise’s apartment and plays vile sexual games with Sophie for money; he has no qualms about what he is (or so he would leads others to think). Johnny, in a parallel scene, insinuates himself into the life of a cowlike tea-shop countergirl and compulsively wounds her almost without trying. He would really rather not do that, we gather, but he has left himself no choice but to be like this with everyone, even those who claim to care.

As a character, Johnny ought not to be watchable at all, but Thewlis makes him fascinating to watch—spitting out his dialogue in an obscenity-laden brogue, lashing out at the human race that he has worked so hard to exclude himself from. Johnny is obviously intelligent and not without a certain amount of heart, but so wounded, so gratuitously cruel to everyone around him that you are forced to ask what made him like this. The movie’s answer seems to be that a cause is not necessary: Some people, like Johnny, drop through society’s cracks not because of some systemic failure but because in their hearts they would really not have it any other way. Being an outsider gives Johnny the freedom to hit and run, to be a parasite and a hypocrite, and not have to face up to anyone but himself for it. It’s easier to tell yourself the world’s not worth fitting into when the real reason is you abdicated your own humanity.

Mike Leigh has been making films since the early Sixties, at first for TV and then theatrically. His filmmaking and storytelling methodology is closer to improvisational theater than anything you’d come across in a conventional screenwriting workshop. He selects a group of actors, provides them with notions about their character, allows them to improvise, and then builds the script out of those improvisations. Like Life is Sweet and High Hopes (two films that immediately predated Naked), instead of the gears of plot contrivances there are the messy accidents of real life, and the sting of truth. Leigh’s point of view about Johnny is that he is a total idealist, the sort of man who dreamed big and found the world simply didn’t measure up.

The most common criticism I hear about Naked, or most any movie of its ilk, is that it’s “depressing,” which as far as I can tell is shorthand for saying the movie doesn’t cater to an audience’s prejudice about what a movie should contain. It has no false hope about these people, no cheap escapes for them to dive into, no plot contrivances for them to hide behind. Near the end Johnny and Jeremy cross paths, but there isn’t the violent showdown that a lesser movie might use in place of a real insight. We have to take Johnny and Sophie and Louise and Jeremy and all the rest of them on their own terms —again, naked. The very last scenes in particular are as comfortless as can be—but, again, the whole point of the film has been that for Johnny, there is no bottom, only down. To lie about that would have truly been depressing.