What do you expect from a film called Shame with an NC-17 rating? Right at the start we see Brandon awake in the pale blue sheets of his bed. He gets up, goes to the bathroom, and turns around. He has a penis, and I suppose it is Michael Fassbender’s. So many of the things an actor brings to a picture are his parts, and it is up to us and the whole project to decide whether they also belong to a credible and interesting fictional character.

Brandon exists alone in a Manhattan apartment with those bed sheets and his situation. He is obsessed with uninvolved sex: He picks up ten-minute stands in bars; he ravishes women on the subway just by looking at them; he has chat-room sex on the Internet and he is such a connoisseur of pornography his workplace computer has been taken away to be purged; so he goes to the men’s room at the office to masturbate. He can’t get enough, but it’s never enough. He suffers from that ominous word in the film’s title. So there’s not much fun in Brandon’s routine—unless watching is the secret to fun. But we are the watchers, aren’t we? Have we come to be ashamed or disgraced, or to get a look at Fassbender? Suppose the film had been called Pleasure? Aren’t we allowed a little of that in watching? Or are we meant to be downcast, too?

In short, Shame means to show us a lot of sexual activity with unusual candor or directness in a mainstream film (hence the rating), while asserting that Brandon’s urge is driving him to misery and ultimate collapse in the sad rain falling on a desolate city pier. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt is meticulously harrowing in his deprived color scheme and the ordeal of New York. Quantities of Goldberg Variations mingle with the hiss of traffic so that you wish J. S. Bach still had an agent.

We never know much about Brandon, let alone why he has his situation. He says he came from Ireland to New Jersey as a teenager, but that’s no help. He cannot make a relationship with any of his women. (In his relentless pilgrimage, he even tries gay sex!) There would hardly be a movie without the arrival of his sister, Sissie (Carey Mulligan). She comes from Los Angeles, and says she is a singer. The film tries to support this by having her sing all of “New York, New York,” slowly, and Brandon sheds a tear over it (a tear by Faberge?), though I don’t think the “singer” status is proved. Sissie asks to stay with her brother, because she needs a place and wants to make contact with him. But Brandon is so fixedly alone, when poor Sissie creeps into his bed for sibling comfort he roars at her to get out.

If I sound despondent over this, I won’t apologize. Carey Mulligan is as touching as ever, though I wonder if her woeful look isn’t because she is weary of the pained roles she is getting. Michael Fassbender is clearly the actor of the moment, and he carries this film for 99 minutes on his commanding, ravaged looks and sheer courage. He is like a fallen god and a rising demon and could not be better—unless he smiled and enjoyed something.