Stephen Shainberg’s fictional biography of the late photographer Diane Arbus depicts a world full of mystery, intrigue, and outsiders. The only thing missing is the title character.

Arbus, known for her unsettling portraits of people on the outskirts of society, was born in 1937 to an affluent family of furriers who owned the Russeks department store chain. At age 14, she met aspiring actor Allan Arbus, married him shortly after turning 18, and the two began a successful career as fashion photographers. It wasn’t until the 1960s that she began to aggressively collect her oddball menagerie of circus freaks, outcasts, and passersby.

Arbus (Nicole Kidman) is a difficult figure to comprehend and Mr. Shainberg has refused to debate whether her photos were exploitative or appreciative of the unusual characters she chose to photograph. The director has also steered clear of Arbus’s 1971 suicide in his “imaginary portrait.”

Rather than attempt a traditional biopic, Mr. Shainberg has tried to create a fictional world based on the Arbus aesthetic. In refusing to re-create a historical narrative, the director (best known for his 2002 S&M comedy “Secretary”) has avoided many of the traps that strain realist biography, but subsequently falls into some of his own creation.

Creating a new narrative from a famous life is a worthy task, but does not reap much profit in “Fur.” Rather than gain any insight into the mind of Diane Arbus, Mr. Shainberg has told the tale of an average housewife suffering from clichéd middle-class rebellion. She may have a thing for furry men, but this Arbus has almost no mind of her own.

Here, Arbus toils away as her husband’s assistant until a mystery man moves in upstairs. Intrigued by the hairy man in the mask — Robert Downey Jr. as Lionel, a wig maker and former circus freak who suffers from hypertrichosis — Arbus finds herself lost in a foreign world. She would like to take the mystery man’s picture, but is content to follow him around Manhattan’s dark corners like a voyeuristic puppy dog. Instead of the curious woman traipsing across the city with her camera focusing on whoever caught her eye, “Fur”paints Arbus as a woman under the spell of a man and a world she doesn’t understand. While Mr. Downey spends the majority of the film in a hair suit, Ms. Kidman’s Arbus fetishizes his condition and the abnormalities of the other outliers he brings her into contact with.

The only action that this Arbus takes is a feeble attempt to assimilate her “freaks” into her home life, which only serves to make her seem naïve and once again subservient when it fails.

The film’s obsession with the dichotomy between Arbus’s family life and her photographic subjects is stilted at best. In contrast to Arbus’s prim and scrubbed reality is Lionel’s world of deep colors and intrigue. Once she enters, Arbus seems to lift the veil of her regressive familial existence — to seemingly no one’s benefit.

The refusal of “Fur” to move beyond a superficial understanding of Arbus’s home life and motives leaves the audience with the tired image of a restless housewife. In the hands of another actress, this might not be so pronounced, but Ms. Kidman plays Arbus as a fragile, impressionable woman forever on the verge of a breakdown.

With her whispery voice perpetually on the brink of cracking, Ms. Kidman’s Arbus is a painfully passive creature. Rather than an emerging artist, she often looks like a promotional ad for valium.

This is despite the fact that Ms. Kidman looks more alive and vital in “Fur” than she has in years. But though she breaks free from some of her usual habits, she is too caught up in the “trap” of 1950s motherhood to bring Arbus to life. She often strains to be sexual onscreen, a recurring problem despite casting attempts that seem intent to prove her range.

Arbus once referred to her subjects — which included transvestites, dwarves, giants, prostitutes, and ordinary citizens — as “characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups” and Mr. Shainberg seems intent to bring this image to life. The film starts out promisingly enough, but rather than creating a world worth exploring, the trail of eccentrics in “Fur” quickly becomes mundane and the story lackluster.

mkeane@nysun.com