As the director of Earth Girls Are Easy, the acclaimed Sex Pistols documentary The Filth And The Fury, and some of Duran Duran's finest music videos, veteran British director Julien Temple might seem like an odd choice to direct a biopic of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. But as Pandaemonium wastes little time in asserting, those poets and their peers were the rock stars of their age: young, vibrant artistic and social revolutionaries who lived their art and paid a heavy price for their indulgences. Pandaemonium even opens with a gathering of the poetry-world elite that looks and feels like a rock-star soirée, complete with fainting groupies, a clamoring press, and fierce rivalries among the attendees. Into this chic gathering wanders an addled Coleridge (Linus Roache), who's convinced that the opium he's taken is playing havoc with the fabric of time. From there, the film flashes back to a particularly tumultuous and productive period in his life. John Hannah co-stars as an eminently sensible and relatively bourgeois Wordsworth, who views Roache as a teacher, inspiration, and rival, and is only too happy to follow along on whatever idealistic venture his friend dreams up. Hounded by the British establishment, Roache and Hannah set out to create an artistic utopia in the countryside, but their efforts are complicated by the presence of Hannah's fiery, passionate sister, who quickly falls in love with the charismatic Roache. A creatively fruitful but emotionally devastating addiction to opium further hastens Roache's mental deterioration, while Hannah soon tires of playing Salieri to his wild, self-destructive Mozart, and sets about sabotaging Roache's thriving career. A swooning, overtly romantic tribute to creativity in its most dramatic and passionate forms, Pandaemonium regards Roache's larger-than-life spiritual seeker with a hushed, almost naïvely worshipful reverence. Closer in spirit to Ken Russell's gonzo biopics than the more reserved Merchant-Ivory school of film biography, Pandaemonium is intent on telling Coleridge's story in largely visual, sensual, and cinematic terms, and the result is sublime and vaguely embarrassing in equal measure. But as Roache's mental condition deteriorates, the film loses much of its giddy energy, particularly once he begins prowling the countryside in a wild-eyed, drug-crazed haze. Pandaemonium falls closer to high camp than high art, but its lust for life and affection for its subjects is infectious and invigorating.