Tom of Finland

Dis­till­ing the entire life and lega­cy of a bona fide cul­tur­al icon into a two-hour biopic is nev­er a straight­for­ward task, but direc­tor Dome Karukos­ki stacks the odds in his favour by choos­ing a sub­ject with an espe­cial­ly colour­ful sto­ry to tell.

Tom of Fin­land con­cerns the career of Touko Laak­so­nen (Pekka Strang), who became an under­ground sen­sa­tion in the late 1950s and ear­ly ​’60s when his homo­erot­ic illus­tra­tions were picked up by the Amer­i­can gay inter­est mag­a­zine Physique Pic­to­r­i­al and pub­lished under the epony­mous pseudonym.

At a time when homo­sex­u­al acts were still ille­gal in many parts of Europe and the US, Laaksonen’s hyper-mas­cu­line, heav­i­ly-fetishised draw­ings had a pro­found impact on gay cul­ture, cre­at­ing a dis­tinc­tive look that was fur­ther pop­u­larised by Mar­lon Bran­do in 1953’s The Wild One – one year after Laak­so­nen first put pen­cil to paper.

With their tools, tash­es and bulging mus­cles, these leather-clad beef­cakes are said to have inspired every­one from Fred­die Mer­cury to Robert Map­plethor­pe. To Laak­so­nen, they were a per­son­al response to tra­di­tion­al depic­tions of male viril­i­ty, a con­scious appro­pri­a­tion of Nazi iconog­ra­phy stem­ming from his expe­ri­ences as an offi­cer dur­ing World War Two, which includ­ed var­i­ous sex­u­al encoun­ters with Ger­man soldiers.

Despite con­tain­ing plen­ty of bio­graph­i­cal detail, the film is fair­ly light on con­text, and accord­ing­ly it fails to place Laaksonen’s indi­vid­ual strug­gle with­in the broad­er social and polit­i­cal real­i­ty which made his work so con­tro­ver­sial and so vital – par­tic­u­lar­ly with regards to the AIDS cri­sis. Not exact­ly a deep dive into a less­er-chron­i­cled chap­ter of 20^th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry, then, but a worth­while por­trait of a fas­ci­nat­ing and huge­ly influ­en­tial artist.