Let’s talk about sex.

Professor Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) wanted to talk about it. As recent as the 1940s, the American population remained surprisingly ignorant about the range of sexual behavior. Bill Condon’s new film, Kinsey, is a rich, multi-layered story that will challenge even the most free-thinking of polygamists.

Biopics are a tough genre of film. If you can stuff an entire person’s life into a two-hour period, then he or she probably wasn’t that interesting a person in the first place. Even if you take snapshots of a person’s “greatest hits” and string them together in some fashion, you still probably won’t have much of an idea of who this person was. The best any writer or director can do is to look at a person’s life and see what they meant. If we cannot create a full biography on screen, then what does Person X mean when boiled down to their essentials?

This is the smartest route to take, and Condon does it with great ease and confidence. He wants to take us to why Kinsey is famous in the first place: his sexual behavior studies. He gives us a base introduction by showing us Kinsey’s prudish upbringing under his fundamentalist father (John Lithgow with a seriousness most don’t expect from him anymore), his fascination with the gall wasp and his determination to categorize and collect the species as fully as possible, and his relationship with his student-cum-wife, Mac (Laura Linney). From their first marital relations onward, the film delves not only into Kinsey’s studies of sexual behavior but also into his perceptions of sexuality from the world around him.

Kinsey manages to be such a rich film because it explores the relationships between love and sex, normal and abnormal, and socially acceptable and unacceptable with such clarity and yet never comes down on any side. It wants both the audience and the individual to make judgments on the material. Any film that respects its audience as thoughtful filmgoers who do not need to be fed digestible ideas and rhetoric deserves the utmost praise. If you see Kinsey, make sure you see it with a large group of people. The reaction of your fellow filmgoers to the sexual behavior on screen adds an entirely new dimension to the film.

Condon does his job as a writer/director marvelously, but this film would not be half as wonderful without such strong actors giving some of their best work. I would not be surprised if Neeson, Linney and Peter Sarsgaard (as Kinsey’s lover/assistant Clyde) all received Oscar nominations for their work. They all give powerful performances but almost never raise their voices or act in an unrealistic manner. It’s subtlety and devotion to the characters that help this film feel more like a docudrama than selective non-fiction. Even the smaller supporting characters played by Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker and William Sadler do outstanding work. Hell, Chris O’ Donnell manages not to get in the way, and he deserves a pat on the head for that.

Kinsey is an important film and will most likely remain to be one as long as we live in an America of prudery. Sure, we certainly have come quite a ways since and due in no small part to Alfred Kinsey. But recent protests of the film and of Kinsey as a man who helped to promote “sexual deviancy” show that people like Kinsey’s father and those that protested Kinsey when his books came out are still quite alive and quite pissed. And yet this is material that should be discussed — that needs to be discussed.

Let’s talk about sex? Yes, let’s.