This was a very broad interpretation of the life of Mapplethorpe. It seems that the movie was missing a lot of scenes. Maybe they ended up being cut, or the makers held back. This could have been a masterpiece, but it fell short of that. Redo it with an with a real intention to explore deeper into his life.

I am not really aware of famous or otherwise known photographers to be honest. No matter their main focus when it comes to pictures (no pun intended). So while the poster is quite clear (which rhymes with something that you can consider a pun),wait til you watch the movie ... and don't if you are easily offended or squeamish - there are quite the explicit pictures in this.

Matt Smith in the title role is as good as it gets. I can imagine James Franco in this too (allegedly he was supposed to play the role),but it's probably better this way.

So the movie does not rely on shock value alone, but if you thought Brokeback Mountain went too far, you ain't seen nothing yet ... still this is a really good biopic - at least for someone like me who does not know much about the real person.

Aside from his photography, I knew relatively little about the man himself (apart from his fate) so I was quite looking forward to seeing this. I have seen Matt Smith on stage a few times and he never seems to shy away from a challenging role - yet here, he seems oddly disconnected from the man he is portraying. Physically he looks the part well enough, but somehow he doesn't click. The relationship with Patti Smith (Marianne Rendón) seemed to serve little greater purpose than to tee up his success funded, initially at any rate, but the wealthy Sam Wagstaff (John Hickey) but even I knew that the latter had also funded Smith for a while at the start of her career, so I'm not sure why the evolution of his relationships was quite so statically compartmentalised? What the film does illustrate, however, is a hedonistic lifestyle that clearly fuelled the artist's creativity - and also his demise, and it is also pretty breathtaking to recall that as late as 1990, artists and galleries in the USA were being banned under public decency legislation for creating and displaying images of the male body that thirty years later would probably struggle to raise a 15 rating. A fascinating man, burning the candles at both ends, and hats (and just about everything else) off to Smith for going the role a go - but sadly, this just seems more of a ricochet off his life than a study of it, and that is a shame...