Diane Arbus was an extraordinarily talented artist, and her legacy as one of the most profoundly meaningful photographers to ever live continues to influence artists interested in humanity to this day. I know I have been inspired by Arbus, and many others have been as well. Her relentless provocation of form and content in her photographs were unparalleled and astonishing, and throughout her career, she portrayed a keen eye for detail in understanding humanity. Arbus very famously once said “A photograph is a secret about a secret – the less it tells you, the more you know” – and this statement serves to be particularly true for Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, the semi-fictional biopic of Arbus that takes the fascinating artist and shows her complexities as well as her interests in society, but not the kind of society we consider to be necessarily conventional.

In Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Diane (Nicole Kidman) has yet to start her famous career as a photographer, working as an assistant to her husband Allan (Ty Burrell), an advertising photographer working in print media. Diane is disenchanted with life and is looking for some meaning to her banal existence. She soon encounters, by pure chance (or was it?), a man named Lionel Sweeney (Robert Downey Jr.), a tenant in her apartment building who is extremely unique, and while some may consider him a freak, he is a thoughtful and interesting man, and he fascinates Diane, who becomes friends with him, and later finds herself becoming infatuated with his lifestyle. Together, Diane and Lionel enter into a world occupied by what some may consider “freaks”, and while many look upon these individuals with bitter disgust, Diane is utterly captivated by them. To her, these are the people who should be photographed – and as we know from her stunning photographs, she took on that challenge and used these “freaks” as her muses, through which her anthropological artistry was shown.

Nicole Kidman is such a talented actress, and she is truly remarkable in every project she works in. Kidman seems to have a talent for playing these tortured artists that I admire so much, with one of her famous performances being that of Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s wonderful The Hours. Kidman seems to be the perfect actress to play these complex and ultimately tragic artists, because she has the capacity to be quietly intense and allow the trials and tribulations that existed within these figures to occur through her, with Kidman inhabiting these roles with such passion and dignified restraint. To call Kidman one of the most fascinating actresses of her generation is an understatement: she is most certainly one of the greatest actresses working today, and I am reminded of her immense talent every time I watch one of her films. She is truly extraordinary, and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is most certainly one of her more underrated performances, and the brutality in which she plays Arbus is incredible.

I also need to constantly remind myself that there is far more to Robert Downey Jr. than Tony Stark/Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes and that even though he is one of our most talented leading men in terms of action and comedy films, he is also an incredible dramatic actor. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus came only two short years before his huge comeback role in Iron Man, and it was only a matter of time when he would be thrust back to the top of the cinematic world. However, as much as I like Downey in these blockbusters, I often find him far better in these smaller, independent dramas, where his true dramatic talents are showcased. Consider that for nearly the entire film, Downey is almost entirely unrecognizable, with his own tool of expression being his iconic eyes, used to convey every emotion that this fragile and complex character has. Lionel Sweeney is a fictional character, constructed as both a muse and a temptation to our protagonist, and Downey is fantastic playing the character. His revealing moment was an incredible amalgamation of suspensful framing and masterful acting on behalf of the two leads. A further note: Ty Burrell (best known for his television work) plays Allan Arbus, and he was very good and made me consider an alternative universe where Burrell is set free of the shackles of Modern Family and allowed to appear in great films such as this. He’s a talented actor, and he played the heartbroken husband of Diane Arbus splendidly.

Interestingly enough, for a film about the idiosyncratic and iconoclastic Diane Arbus, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is visually a very different kind of film. Understandably, Arbus’ actual works were not permitted to be used in this film, but there was still something very detached about this film, for the most part, in terms of visual aesthetic. I don’t mean to imply that it was a film that had no visual flair – quite the contrary, as it is a film that shines with a unique aesthetic vision that I can only imagine was done to contrast Arbus’ work – whereas her photographs were almost always in stark black-and-white, this film presents Arbus life as being colorful, filled with eccentric characters and stimulating grandeur in her upper-class lifestyle, which she rejected in favor of her own unique vision of what humanity truly is. Steven Shainberg is a filmmaker who isn’t particularly well-known, but he has shown (through both Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus and his preceding film, Secretary, a forerunner to the Fifty Shades of Grey saga) to be quite the provocateur. His use of color, as well as the way in which he and cinematographer Bill Pope (who has lensed quite a few notable films, such as some of the films of a very different kind of provocative filmmaker, the wonderful Edgar Wright) frame the shots of this film give it a distinctive and remarkable visual style that sets it apart from conventional biopics and allows it to grow into something special.

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is either a fantastic piece of independent biographical drama or an enormous disappointment, depending on what the view goes into this film expecting. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus never promises to be a true-to-life account of the career of Arbus, and as the title and the epigraph to this film clearly state, this is a fictional account of an iconic figure (this is perhaps my favorite part of this film, whereby we experience the subversion of biographical film cliches by having a fictional story of a real-life figure, which makes us question reality. It really pleases the postmodernist in me), and we are given a story about Diane Arbus without it being a sweeping account of her life. Personally, I found this film to be exactly what I was expecting, where I just wanted the spirit of Arbus’ work to be represented in a cinematic form in some way. As Arbus famously stated, “a photograph is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know” – and that principle is alive and well in this film, where the concept of secrecy is a major theme. Don’t go in expecting a cradle-to-grave account of Arbus’ life, because honestly, that isn’t that interesting, and Arbus’ photographs and the few very good biographical resources written about her are more than enough, and I think her work speaks for itself. Therefore, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is really just a film that intends to convince the viewer to seek out Arbus’ work and explore her wonderful artistic career while leaving her personal life where it should be.

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is a great film. Nicole Kidman gives one of her best performances (yet nearly every performance Nicole Kidman gives is one of her best performances), and she is supported by one of the most heartfelt and touching performances Robert Downey Jr. has ever given. It is a complex film and one that is not necessarily easy to follow, but it is one with a truly magnificent soul lurking beneath it, and while it has been the victim of sour opinions from some devotees of Arbus’ work, I can be one of the few admirers of Diane Arbus who can confidently state that Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is a film that does the icon’s legacy well, and presents her (or rather, her ideologies) in a way that pays sufficient tribute to a true genius. It is a moving, brutal and incredible film, and an overlooked masterpiece, if I may so bold as to call it that.