A Mike Leigh film w/ a strong, disturbed central character but a mess of a plot

One of the early films from the under-appreciated British director Mike Leigh, Naked (1993), is worth a look mainly for the knockout performance of David Thewlis as Johnny, a highly intelligent and seriously disturbed young man who over the course of the 48 hours that the film encompasses has many strange interactions with mostly homeless/lonely/impoverished/dangerous/nocturnal Londoners. In each of these encounters Johnny puts up a wall of verbal banter and peculiar ideation that always, eventually, leads to some violent outburst, either by Johnny or directed at him. Altogether, though, I consider this film one of the rare misfires from Leigh; in this instance, his famous way or working – letting the characters and even the plot develop through a many improvisational exercises in which the actors create their characters – seems to lead the film into some blind alleys and not so much moral ambiguity and more incongruity. At the outset we see Johnny raping a young woman in an alleyway (never clear whether he knew the woman), then stealing a car to make a getaway (in a nice touch, he dumps a baby carriage out of the car – as if he didn’t want to inconvenience the victim’s family too much) and takes off from Manchester to London, where he shows up unannounced at the house of a former girlfriend and immediately gets sexually involved w/ the sexy and obviously deeply troubled roommate. Over the course of the film – once he’s kicked out of the domicile – he has strange encounters with among others a night watchman, a man who puts up wall posters (“a stick-up job,” Johnny quips), a homeless man who’s calling out for his girlfriend, et al. What’s troubling is that we want to feel sympathy for Johnny, and we admire his stunted intelligence, but then we see how violent and cruel he can be toward women and we despise him – but does it all make sense? Do we believe in him? Perhaps to make Johnny seem more humane, there’s a much less developed parallel story (the plots strands merge near the end) about a wealthy businessman who is brutally cruel to a # of women, a much more deranged and dangerous man than Johnny, so does his make prefer J as the less evil? To me, it just confused the whole story line – as if Leigh let these actors develop their characters at will without pulling the strands together into a sensible, comprehensible plot.