'Shame' is one of the best movies of the year

Steve McQueen's thrilling second feature, Shame, takes place in a very distinct time and place, an overcast and chilly present-day New York City, and it focuses on an even more distinct pathology: the sexual addiction of a handsome businessman named Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender), whose days are defined by Internet pornography, visits from prostitutes and anonymous subway pickups.

Yet from such geographic and emotional precision, McQueen has conjured up an original, shockingly universal vision -- a portrait of the way we live now, where it's every man for himself and the possibility of a meaningful connection would seem to be a cruel joke.

Like Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris and Blue Velvet before it, Shame -- which screened last month at the Lone Star International Film Festival and which is the first NC-17-rated release from a major studio since 2007's Lust, Caution -- is a sledgehammer to the placidity and familiarity of contemporary moviemaking, mixing up sexuality and emotional violence in sometimes abrasive ways. Just like those movies, it's almost certainly going to be dismissed in certain corners as some kind of avant-garde stunt or puerile provocation.

But while McQueen is a showman, capable of extraordinary flash and bravura (he got his start as a visual artist, specializing in video installation), he seems to be after something more urgent and brave with Shame, a movie that holds up a mirror to the parts of our lives that we'd rather not be forced to consider.

When we first meet Brandon, rolling out of a bed with yet another nameless beauty, he suggests a kind of a spiritual descendant of Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho -- a man so corrupted by the trappings of modern society that he no longer has an identity of his own. But in an ingenious early sequence, as McQueen cross-cuts between Brandon on the subway, staring at and trying to seduce a woman across from him, and a very naked Brandon, viewed at waist level, wandering around his sterile apartment, Shame begins to hint at something deeper.

Brandon isn't a consumerist cartoon, a la Patrick Bateman, and Shame is no facile satire. Instead, the film explores that fine line between control and excess, and it plugs right into the scary rhythms of the Internet age, and the way speed and ease of access have turned our lives upside down.

Until now, the 30-ish Brandon -- who is an executive at some kind of design or advertising firm, presumably making a lot of money but deriving no spiritual sustenance from the work -- has floated easily through life, attracting little scrutiny for his addiction. But then Brandon's younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up. Stumbling upon her in his apartment shower, where Sissy doesn't seem especially fazed to be naked in his presence, Brandon is clearly rattled.

Later, Sissy invites her brother and his boss (James Badge Dale) to a nightclub and sings an agonizingly slowed-down version of Liza Minnelli's New York, New York, a performance that leaves Brandon in tears.

Written by McQueen and Abi Morgan (who also wrote the new Margaret Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep), Shame suggests a history of shared sexual abuse between brother and sister. The specifics remain vague; McQueen is more interested in exploring how trying to survive in a dog-eat-dog city has magnified and complicated their trauma. The use of New York, New York is especially telling; McQueen re-imagines an iconic song as a kind of funeral dirge. The bright lights still beckon, but the promise has turned sour.

McQueen's previous effort was the widely praised Hunger, a drama about IRA militant Bobby Sands (also played by Fassbender), who starved himself to death in a hunger strike. As with the earlier film, McQueen again conjures artfully composed images and prefers long, hypnotic takes. But if the rigorous technique often distracted from Hunger, here's it's wholly organic to McQueen's themes of post-Sept. 11 isolation and despair. At one point, the director follows Brandon jogging in an unbroken, blocks-long take. The scene at first defies belief (how did they pull this off without causing a 10-car pileup on Sixth Avenue?), but steadily pushes beyond technical razzle-dazzle and becomes a genuinely beautiful vision of a man trying to revive his spirit, framed against the cold glare of the nighttime city.

Shame might easily have become too suffocating ( Hunger certainly did), but McQueen also delivers moments of unexpected humor -- a restaurant date between Brandon and a co-worker that keeps getting interrupted by an overly insistent waiter. And the actors are spellbinding: Mulligan is heartbreakingly fragile; Fassbender finds a striking balance between calm and mania, control and hedonism, clamminess and eroticism.

Scene after scene, moment to moment, Shame exerts its hypnotic, queasy pull -- I watched it with my heart racing and a knot in my stomach. McQueen tosses off provocations and asks unanswerable questions, right up until the unexpectedly nerve-wracking final moments, which find Brandon once again on the subway, trying to keep his desperation in check. Cut to black: Will this decent-seeming but hopelessly lost man ever be able to find steady ground beneath his feet? Will any of us? Shame is a one-of-a-kind snapshot of the here-and-now that leaves us both eager and terrified to find out what happens next.