Uproariously insipid and tirelessly misogynistic, ‘‘Never Die Alone’’ is the most gratuitous specimen of unfazed villain worship since Bob Guccione’s "Caligula."

Depicting the rise and fall of a vicious drug kingpin, the movie even out-Scarfaces Brian DePalma’s ‘‘Scarface’’ — the difference being a general lack of substance and director Ernest R. Dickerson’s indescribably pathetic attempt to enshrine this smackpeddling demon as some sort of urban folk hero worthy of our admiration.

Adapted from the novel by late writer Donald Goines (a one-time prison convict who specialized in short, brutish books with titles such as ‘‘Whoreson’’ and ‘‘Dopefiend’’), ‘‘Never Die Alone’’ tells the story of a perfectly lovely man named David — ‘‘King David’’ to his associates on the streets — who rolls into town behind the wheel of a candyapple Stutz brandishing a duffel bag full of cash and head full of bad prose. The King, who skipped town a few years back, owes some very dangerous people a lot of money and like the prodigal son he’s come home to settle up.

The King is played by gravel-throated rapper DMX, whose skills as an actor are so negligible he’d need four years at Julliard just to match meagerly talented co-star David Arquette (‘‘Scary Movie’’), here playing a struggling white writer who takes an apartment in the ghetto to jump-start his creative juices. When the King is mortally wounded by his enemies, the writer, Paul, is on the scene to take the fallen pusher to the hospital and hear his sordid story. ‘‘Talkin’!’’ The King rasps. ‘‘It ... helps ... ease ... the pain!’’

The rest is like ‘‘Interview With a Gangsta,’’ as Paul pieces together the missing stretch of The King’s life from confessional audio tapes he finds in the Cadillac. In flashback, we see The King descend on Los Angeles, get some girlfriends hooked on Lady H, build a thriving drug franchise and bolt town with a murder on his conscience.

Meanwhile, Paul — who somehow inherited all of The King’s possessions in the five minutes that he knew him — dons his dead benefactor’s diamond ring and sets out channeling all that hardboiled living into a gritty best-seller. When someone asks Paul why he’s so fixated on The King, his answer is beyond asinine: ‘‘Did you see him? He had this ... nobility!’’

He did? Golly, I must have missed that while musing on his fondness for the stereotypical expletive he applies to literally every speaking female character in the movie. Or when he shrewdly tricks one of those troublesome women into shooting up battery acid residue. As villainous behavior goes, that stuff is perfectly legitimate — maybe even luridly fascinating — but it makes the King’s 11th-hour atonement seem ... oh, I don’t know, a bit irrelevant?

Irrelevance is everywhere in ‘‘Never Die Alone,’’ from the Casio keyboard soundtrack to the faint stench of broken logic that Dickerson (‘‘Juice’’) leaves in every scene. Overall, it’s the kind of exasperating, ill-conceived junk production that unwittingly underscores the appeal of heroin abuse: It helps ease the pain.