By all accounts, songwriter Cole Porter was just as charming and sophisticated as the lyrics he wrote for such classic pop tunes as “Night and Day,” “You’re the Top,” “Begin the Beguine,” and “It’s De-Lovely,” all of which are heard in this elaborately mounted biographical film. But Porter, who spent his last 27 years crippled and in pain from injuries sustained in a riding accident, was a man of great contradictions. For instance, despite his obvious affections for Linda Lee Thomas, the wealthy socialite to whom he remained married, he continued to pursue male lovers. Costars Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd adroitly capture Cole and Linda’s dynamic here, playing the roles very much like the protagonists in a Depression-era stage musical or a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. They glide gracefully and seemingly effortlessly through life, enjoying the finest of everything and numbering among their friends many of the most famous and fascinating people of the pre-World War II era. Yet Cole has needs that Linda cannot meet; it’s a measure of their worldliness that she tolerates his dalliances because she’d rather have him some of the time than not at all. Screenwriter Jay Cocks employs an endearingly corny device to tell Cole’s story: The tunesmith’s life unfolds as a series of scenes rehearsed on a heavenly stage under the direction of an angel (played by Jonathan Pryce). In many respects, filmmaker Irwin Winkler -- who previously directed Kline in Life as a House -- re-creates the period accurately, though the use of contemporary pop artists (Alanis Morissette, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow) is a jarringly discordant note in the otherwise pitch-perfect replication of a bygone era. That aside, De-Lovely is as delightful and delicious as you could hope.