For instance, audiences at The Aviator would probably not care to hear Howard Hughes talk through the thoughts that led to his decision to countersink the rivets on the body of an airplane. They will sit through a scene of Hughes ordering his designer to countersink them, and they may like the high-gloss shot of him caressing the fuselage to make sure that his orders have been carried out. But what audiences really want is for Hughes to get up in the plane, especially if they've read about the movie's recreations of his crash landings. Ray takes an even shorter cut to Charles's discovery of his musical style. When he steps in for an absent musician in Seattle he plays for about ten seconds before the woman who owns the joint announces that he's saved the day. Later, he's told by record producers that they don't want to record him if he's going to imitate Nat King Cole so he stops immediately.

Even if the moviemakers could figure out a way to film the subject's working processes in a naturalistic documentary style that audiences would enjoy--and the sequences in Kinsey that explain the professor's interviewing techniques by showing him train his assistants to more effectively ask him probing questions about his own sexual activity are surprisingly snappy--that's still a different matter from presenting a dramatic character. Worse, the fact that biopics are structured as heroic romance makes the possibility of dramatic interpretation of character more remote: the knights of romance embody noble ideals and elicit only unmixed reactions. Their temptations, and hence their complexity, tend to be allegorically externalized. But you can't create complexity merely by setting the character flaws next to the heroic accomplishments.

In this one respect Kinsey is easily the best of the recent batch of biopics. Writer-director Bill Condon has come up with a nifty ironic conception of Alfred Kinsey, his sex-researcher hero. The thing that makes Kinsey so unlikely as the front man for a sexual revolution--the fact that he's a socially ungainly, obsessively methodical entomologist--is also what makes him perfect for the job. Kinsey's reaction against the vigilant Puritanism of his Methodist father (who fulminates against zippers as tools of modern depravity) has not made the son a libertine but a man who approaches everything with scientific objectivity, even his own sexual difficulties on his wedding night. What a relief it is to him as a man of science to learn it's because his penis is so large. Kinsey's peculiar detachment is a plus once he turns to "collecting" the sexual habits of his fellow Americans, the way he had collected hundreds of thousands of samples of the gall wasp, because it gives him respectability as well as methodological rigor. And it prevents him from getting emotionally unbalanced even when he and his wife start generating some sexual statistics of their own (together and separately, with the same man).