Put crudely, this is his attempt to out-Tarantino Tarantino. But the entire movie feels manic and forced, as though Scorsese is straining to make the craziest, most over-the-top picture ever-as if he is determined, at seventy-one, to outdo his earlier triumphs, “Raging Bull” and “GoodFellas,” and to show that he’s still the king. Leonardo DiCaprio puts his voice, his body, and his handsome face, which he contorts into a grimace, into what is certainly his largest performance yet. “Wolf” has great, giddy moments, and Terence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire”), who did the adaptation, creates flurries of raucously cynical dialogue that hit you like a rapid series of jabs. (Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer.) The camera plunges into groups of stockbrokers, cleaving their numbers as Moses did the Red Sea it swings over them and then swings back, like some video-enhanced boomerang. Scorsese employs a flexible narrative form and a free-swinging style of filming. Set in the period from the mid-eighties to the aughts, it’s a three-hour-long satire of loathsome financial activity and extravagant debauchery, and it’s meant to epitomize everything that has gone wrong with money culture. The movie is based on a memoir of the same title, by the Wall Street scoundrel Jordan Belfort, who cheated his clients out of tens of millions of dollars, ratted on his friends, and was indicted and jailed for securities fraud and money-laundering. Opinions about Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” will be-how can I put it gently?-volatile.

How does wolf of wall street movie end