Johnny Depp’s royal romp is just the latest shambolic comeback film from a disgraced star

Jeanne du Barry is a powdered and periwigged costume drama, pungently set in the palace of Louis XV and positively teaming with scheming courtiers. The first rule of Versailles, we are told, is never turn your back on the king. The courtiers may exit his presence with shuffling steps, bowing and scraping all the while. But whatever they do, they mustn’t give him the cold shoulder. It would make the king feel unloved and ignored by his subjects. It might make him think he’s done something to upset them.

In Jeanne du Barry, which opened quietly in UK cinemas this week, the king is played by a sad-eyed Johnny Depp, a Hollywood superstar turned pariah, dogged by accusations of domestic abuse and now shunned by many of the studios that once ran to greet him. The role of Louis XV is his first acting job in three years. Does that make it a comeback? Even Depp has his doubts. “I keep hearing this word ‘comeback’ and I wonder about that, because I didn’t really go anywhere,” he told reporters ahead of the film’s premiere. “Maybe people stopped calling, but I didn’t go nowhere. I’ve been sitting around.”

On-screen, Depp’s the king. Off screen, he’s like a 21st-century Norma Desmond, mouldering in his mansion and largely forgotten by the public. The 60-year-old is still big, it’s just the films that got small. Which is to say that Jeanne du Barry is a French-language co-production, largely bankrolled by Saudi cash, that was unveiled without fuss in central London this week. “Johnny Depp flashes yellowing smile at fans,” ran the ungallant headline in Metro the next morning. I see this as the journalistic equivalent of exiting the king’s presence: a dutiful curtsey while shuffling backwards at speed.

Kevin Spacey has fumed on the sidelines for years. Armie Hammer now sells timeshares in the tropics. But these are the exceptions. Most disgraced actors aren’t cancelled in the literal sense of the word (to stop, to make void). More often than not they fade out, like the Cheshire Cat, until all that remains is a smile and a nib on page six. “There are no second acts in American lives,” said F Scott Fitzgerald – but of course he was wrong. It exists in student films, corporate videos and obscure action films that tend not to sell outside Russia.

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There’s nothing Hollywood likes better than a comeback story, a redemptive arc, the Robert Downey Jr grand tour from rehab to an Oscar. But there’s something fascinating, too, about the comebacks that sputter – and Jeanne du Barry, for all its pomp and silliness, is never without interest. Depp’s royal romp joins a bizarre sub-genre of films that feel haunted and defined by the offscreen troubles of their stars. It’s one of a handful of pictures that don’t merely carry the whiff of failure but that opt to lean into it, inhale it, and try to spin it to their advantage.

Easily the best of this bunch is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, in which Mickey Rourke (his reputation in tatters; his features tenderised by boxing bouts) picked up an Oscar nomination for his turn as washed-up, punch-drunk “Ram” Robinson. The wildest, though, is probably Paul Schrader’s The Canyons, a stumbling erotic thriller that cast Lindsay Lohan in the role of a blasted Hollywood actor. Lohan, at the time, was fresh out of jail, with one foot metaphorically still in rehab. Her performance (assuming it even is a performance) steers the film on a hazardous course. “Working with Lindsay was difficult,” Schrader confessed afterwards. “She has a hard time separating fantasy from reality.”

When Jeanne du Barry premiered at last year’s Cannes film festival, the organisers were criticised for allowing Depp through the door. The festival enjoys these kinds of controversies. It likes bun fights and scandals and ill-starred comebacks, figuring perhaps that this is all part of cinema’s rich tapestry. It was Cannes, you’ll recall, that premiered 2011’s The Beaver, the dead-on-arrival star vehicle for a post-racist-meltdown Mel Gibson. And it was Cannes, too, that laid on the notorious midnight screening of Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York, featuring Gerard Depardieu in the role of a brutish sexual predator.

The Chilean director Pablo Larraín once made an excellent film called The Club. It was about a band of disgraced Catholic priests in a little house by the sea. The film festival circuit might be the celebrity version of that. It’s a limbo or a lifeline, sometimes a fire sale. It’s scheduled on the understanding that most viewers will turn their backs and that those who remain will be the diehards, the cultists and those who are more gripped by disaster than by tales of success. Shamed stars never die; they’re only sitting around in the dark. We know them by the flash of a yellowing smile.

‘Jeanne du Barry’ is in cinemas, and available on digital release from 20 May