Entertainment

A graphically good ‘Shame’

Michael Fassbender bares all — and then some — in a riveting performance as a Manhattan sex addict spiraling out of control in “Shame,’’ a grim and arty drama that more than earns its NC-17 rating.

Between joyless subway pickups and assignations with hookers, Brandon (Fassbender) occupies an apartment as spare as a boutique hotel room in the creepy area below West 34th Street once aptly known as the Tenderloin.

There he dutifully rents the erotic delights of the Internet, dodging pleading phone calls from a mysterious woman who finally turns up unannounced naked in his shower.

Played by a fully frontally nude Carey Mulligan, she turns out to be Brandon’s even more screwed-up sister Sissy, who’s arrived from Los Angeles for a stay of (for Brandon) distressingly indefinite length.

Sissy’s tendency to crawl into her brother’s bed at night more than hints at an incestuous relationship when these Irish-born siblings were growing up in New Jersey (not that you’d necessarily believe this from their accents).

She teases her unnerved brother by teetering on the edge of a subway platform and even pulls a tear out of ice-cold Brandon with her dirge-like delivery of “New York, New York’’ at a bar where she’s singing.

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Somehow this appeals to Brandon’s horndog married boss David (James Badge Dale), who’s turned a winking blind eye to Brandon’s “filthy” work computer (“must be the intern”).

The sound of Sissy carrying on with David in the next room is enough to send Brandon off silently screaming into the night — in a long tracking shot over to Madison Square Garden that, like all too many in this movie, calls undue attention to itself.

The newly sober addict tries to swear off his shameful ways, or at least toss his porn stash and ask a beautiful colleague, Marianne (Nicole Beharie), out for a date.

Their dinner conversation is almost hilariously awkward, especially when he finally admits his phobias about commitment.

It’s no surprise when their romantic rendezvous at the Standard Hotel is a nonstarter, and he ends up having to order out for a less emotionally demanding sex partner.

Poor Brandon is so anguished that he launches into the filmmakers’ somewhat dated version of Manhattan’s Dante’s Inferno.

This amounts to getting punched out in a bar by the boyfriend of a woman who he tries to pick up, anonymous gay sex with multiple partners and a good, old-fashioned threesome with hookers.

All the while, Sissy is desperately trying to reach him on the phone. Will Brandon pull out of his tailspin before she does something really terrible to herself? It’s not giving away anything to report the ending is not exactly reassuring.

Steve McQueen — a British video artist who took the actor’s name and previously directed Fassbender as an IRA hunger striker in “Hunger” — and his writing collaborator, Abi Morgan, aren’t exactly subtle.

And a little humor would have helped leaven a movie that is frankly often very difficult to watch.

But they do provide a showcase for one of the most exciting actors working in film today, capping a remarkable 2011 (Rochester in “Jane Eyre,” Magneto in “X-Men: First Class” and Jung in “A Dangerous Method”) with a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him performance that will surely net Fassbender an Oscar nomination.

And as the fragile, suicidal Sissy, Mulligan finally lives up to the attention she’s been receiving since her Oscar-nominated bow in “An Education.”

“Shame” is no “Last Tango in Manhattan,’’ but is it a date movie? That really depends on you and your companion’s appreciation for a star-driven movie that makes sex seem totally unappealing — and with an emotional temperature hovering somewhere in the single digits.