At a time when Hollywood has gone bio-pic crazy, churning out fetishistic reenactments with all the soul and style of a Hallmark television special, it's bracing to see what Steven Shainberg has made of Diane Arbus in "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus." Loosely based on the superb 1984 biography by Patricia Bosworth, "Fur" throws the text out and is instead an abstract, almost surreal meditation on the pivotal moment in Arbus's life when she eschewed her bourgeois upbringing and took a leap of faith into art.

Nicole Kidman is ramrod straight as Arbus, the prim wife and business partner of a commercial photographer; with two children, a burgeoning business and all the expectations commensurate with an upper-class upbringing, she's a woman resigned to a cosseted fate. But then a mysterious man moves into the apartment upstairs (Robert Downey Jr. as an original sexy beast), and Diane discovers the subterranean world of freaks, geeks and misfits with whose portraits she would revolutionize photography.

Purists will howl at the liberties Shainberg has taken with the facts, but there's a bravery to "Fur," an uncompromising commitment to its narrow focus -- of one woman's creative birth -- that rhymes with Arbus's own artistic courage.

-- Ann Hornaday (Nov. 16, 2006)

Contains graphic nudity, sexuality and profanity.