A venom-spitting subway poet, the gutter-bard of Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr was a writer inspired by a horror of wasted life, whose work explored the crushed hopes of those squirming in the quagmire of poverty and addiction. Which is understandable for a man unlucky enough to catch a crippling dose of TB from a cow, grapple with substance abuse himself and be christened Hubert (he preferred his nickname, Cubby).

Transposed to the screen without the gut-wrenching panache of Aronofsky's Requiem For A Dream, however, Selby Jr's unrelentingly bleak world view feels more like a protracted whinge than a primal howl; a numbingly ugly piece of miserablist porn that depresses when it aims to devastate.

Last Exit To Brooklyn is set in the New York slums of the Fifties � all badda-binging greasers with kiss curls and flick knives, frayed streetwalkers and sweaty men in vests urinating out of tenement windows. Among an oddball cast of also-rans (Stephen Baldwin, Alexis Arquette) and character actors (Burt Young, Jerry Orbach) choking on thick-tongued Bronx accents, two figures stand to the fore.

Harry (Stephen Lang), a cold, fish-eyed presence, is a strike-leading factory worker who is secretly � and then not so secretly � in love with a ladyboy. Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her name alone suggesting someone not listening to life as it passes them by, is a prostitute with bleached blond hair that aims for 'Hollywood' but stops off at 'Hooker'. She falls for an army officer on his way to the Korean War. Clearly, we shouldn't be expecting much in the way of a happy ending.

Blue-mouthed and black-hearted, Last Exit To Brooklyn treads territory familiar from On The Waterfront and West Side Story, but in mixing Selby Jr's scattershot scenarios with gritty realism and film-inflected pastiche, Edel's movie feels staged and second-hand, a set text brought flatly and over-faithfully to the screen.

It's certainly a punishing watch, and the high points (if you can call them that) � an imaginatively staged RTA and a brutal, squelching gang-rape that makes ugly, Peckinpah-like inferences as to the victim's culpability � are as affecting as watching puppies being kicked. But none of this qualifies Last Exit To Brooklyn as meaningful film-making.

Only in Selby Jr's world would we be asked to pity a man sacked from his cruisy job for sleeping with a drugged-up transvestite and, besides, what is pity but the basest of car-crash emotions?

There is no requiem for these characters' dreams because they never had the chance to dream them in the first place. Their grim trajectories are dictated by an unwritten rule � that nothing means anything; that life in all it's ugliness continues � and the overall feeling is of watching insects, at a distance, crawling over each other on an apple core.

It may be a brave, unflinching, balls-to-the-wall effort, but in attempting to show us the true dregs of humanity, Edel forgets one crucial aspect. The humanity.

Last Exit To Brooklyn is out to buy on 2nd October in a Special 2 Disc Edition (RRP �19.99) including It/ll Be Better Tomorrow, a feature length documentary on Hubert Selby Jnr.