In her first scripted feature, documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner attempts to tell the story of Robert Mapplethorpe, the queer photographer known for his powerful yet controversial black-and-white images of BDSM and gay sex, but Timoner falls short of capturing what made Mapplethorpe so daring. Though the film doesn’t shy away from showing his work or some of the traits that made him complicated, like his narcissism or tendency to destroy personal relationships, it refuses to lean into those scenes in a way that would give the story a bit more nuance. Instead, it jams in as many of the important moments in Mapplethorpe’s life from 1967 to his death from AIDS in 1989 as it can in an hour and a half, another entry in the list of biopics (like Bohemian Rhapsody) that reduce the career of an iconoclast to a formulaic biopic that refuses to scratch beneath the surface.