Recently, I was having a discussion with a transgendered man, and he said something interesting. We were discussing the different experiences of a man and a woman, and he said that the most unexpected difference was he never expected to be so visually oriented. During the transition, his visual sense was heightened and he started seeing things in terms of visual pleasure. It’s not like he was blind before he started hormone replacement therapy, but after it he started understanding what men meant when we stated that we are more visually oriented. That’s not to say that women can’t be or aren’t visual people, but there may be a difference in how hormones process sensory stimuli that we’re just now starting to wrap our brains around.

If you’re a gay man, you live with a bombardment of iconography and visual stimuli. Gay men have deconstructed, parceled out, and reconstructed traditional male existence into fetishized objects of desire. Few did more to codify the fetishized male than Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. A prolific artist, Tom of Finland produced thousands of pornographic drawings that would be published in America on the covers of beefcake magazines and then in the pornographic fetish magazines that replaced those.

Tom’s claim to fame was in codifying the hard muscled, big cocked, big titted man as the ideal of masculinity, and then fetishizing blue collar jobs and hobbies through their apparel by making them as tight as possible. His most common man was a mustachioed body-builder type with an open leather jacket and tight pants that emphasized the outline of a giant cock and gripped the model’s big round butt before diving into leather boots. It wasn’t just that he created a whole litany of iconography, its that he was great at drawing these fantasy men, first capturing their essence and later moving to photorealistic techniques that nonetheless emphasized the distorted body parts.

Dome Karukoski’s new biopic, Tom of Finland, is the first narrative biopic to portray Touko’s life, following his journey from a closeted soldier during World War II all the way through the AIDS crisis until his death in 1991. It seems that Karukoski’s goal in creating Tom of Finland was in making a case for the male gaze as a natural part of the world. Periodically, throughout the film, Karukoski inserts images of “Tom’s Men” as a heightened reality to the natural visual tableau, Touko’s enhanced visions of certain scenes. At one point, Tom sees a bunch of motorcycle guys polishing and tinkering on their bikes, and Tom’s leatherman relaxed in the center of the bikes, beckoning Tom with pure muscle fantasy eroticism.

As a fictionalized biopic and as a primer on how the male gaze can fetishize the world, Tom of Finland is thoroughly entertaining with good acting, well-developed characters, a great pace, decent messages, and occasionally outlandish visuals. The bigger problem comes from this being a hagiographic biopic by two straight men who are more interested in honoring a Finnish legend than actually figuring out his role in American gay culture. Tom of Finland doesn’t insert dates into the film, expecting us to figure out what era we’re in based on how much grey hair and old man makeup is being used in the scene. As such, when Tom makes it to America, it seems like a post-Stonewall America even if he was first published in 1956. The jumps in time make it seem like America was always a great place of gay acceptance compared to Europe’s behind-the-times comparison.

That’s not only where the heterosexuality behind the camera makes a difference. While this version of the biopic would definitely get a Hard R if not an NC-17 for its gay sexuality and frequent male nudity, it still shies away from the truly pornographic imagery that Tom of Finland also produced. Tom didn’t just fetishize the outfits that would define whole scenes of gay culture (see also: Cruising), but he depicted the actual fetishes of gay life. His art frequently dove into the pornographic and fetishistic with actual erections going into orifaces, and naked men being tied up for the pleasure of other men. While Tom of Finland certainly doesn’t shy away from homosexuality, Karukoski also doesn’t revel or exploit homosexuality for our purposes, and there certainly isn’t a tumescent penis to be seen (unless they’re inflatable).

Even with these not-that-minor problems, Tom of Finland is still a damned enjoyable middle-of-the-road biopic that wears its crowd-pleasing Oscar Bait intentions on its sleeve. Karukoski’s flawed film is better than it has any right to be. It’s conventional, fast paced, glossy, easy on the eyes, and kind of dumb. But, I still enjoyed myself.