Director Dome Karukoski brings an oddly tasteful approach... But once Laaksonen achieves success and finds domestic happiness with a ballet dancer, the filmmakers don't have much to say about their subject.

In a subtle but wily performance, Strang never loses sight of his character's innate sense of resistance.

In the end, the overarching theme of "Tom of Finland" is the power of art, even - or maybe especially - so-called deviant art.

The ghost of war and trauma became muses cheering on his satirical fetish art, which transformed threatening tormentors into a beckoning aesthetic ideal with plenty of biker beefcakes and overly uniformed men of authority.