Cinematic biographies tend to be reverential, well researched - if dull - chronicles of the subject seeking to authentically portray their life without a lot of artistic licence.

Here director Stephen Shainberg takes the fledgling photographic career of Diane Arbus and places it in a fairy tale world that could have been dreamed up by David Lynch and Lewis Caroll after a session on the jazz cigarettes.

Arbus is credited with changing the face of American photography with her portraits of so-called freaks - transvestites, circus performers, dominatrixes - in the early 1960s.

Yet she started out as the demure daughter of the Russek dynasty - an exclusive furrier and New York department store owner - and the wife of an advertising photographer.

But she had a dark side...and Shainberg brings it out courtesy of a mysterious masked tenant who moves into the flat above the Arbus family in Manhattan.

Curious, Diane pays the new neighbour an unscheduled visit and enters the surreal and slightly sinister world of a circus act-turned professional wig-maker.

Lionel (Downey Jr) has a freak genetic condition which means that his hair grows at an extremely fast rate giving him the appearance of the Lion in the Wizard of Oz. Or Chewy from Star Wars.

After winning Diane's confidence, he starts introducing her to New York's demi-monde, and she is seduced by this nether world of freaky flotsam bobbing around society's margins.

When hairy Lionel first hoves into view, the natural reaction is to stifle a giggle...but Downey Jr and Kidman play the off-kilter situation so straight you're happy to run with it.

There's elements of The Elephant Man crossed with Alice in Wonderland as a surprisingly tender romance emerges with Diane increasingly neglecting her straitlaced hubbie downstairs.

A little overlong at more than two hours, this is nevertheless an intriguing affair - a weird palette of full colour where most biopics are black and white.

Tim Evans