An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus announces itself as a biography by another means. Thus, Arbus' startling discovery of her rich imagination becomes a metaphorical Alice in Wonderland adventure in which she falls not down a rabbit hole but up a stairway into the strange abode of a beguiling fellow tenant in a New York apartment building in 1958. The conceit by director Steven Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson is infected by the extremely banal notion that the photographer's famous fascination with outsiders -- transvestites, circus performers, people with physical or psychological abnormalities -- means that "Fur" must be a freak show.

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