Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) grew up in a home with a fundamentalist preacher father, John Lithgow, and a mother with little to say. He escaped and became a Harvard educated zoologist, specializing in the study of gall wasps. Pretty dry stuff for the man who would later revolutionize, and in some quarters, scandalize the culture’s notion and nature of sexuality.

As part of the rebellion to his strict upbringing, Kinsey teaches biology at Indiana University where he meets and marries a whimsical freethinking student named Clara (Laura Linney). In his studies he discovers an astonishing amount of new information on sexual behavior at the same time that students seek him out for advice on sexual concerns and problems. Kinsey realizes that possibly he’s the one that should do clinical research to yield the answer to many of the students’ questions.

Using a strict scientific perspective, he recruits a team of researchers to help people overcome shame, fear and guilt, and to speak freely about their sexual histories. While this was more of less by the book, Kinsey truly went into new territory when he created an open sexual environment among his team and their wives. They were "swinging" well before the ’60s and on both sides of the aisle.

Kinsey was hero of the day when his ground-breaking book "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was published in 1948. It was considered radically new but when he did a follow up study on women, it was seen as an attack on basic American values. Just about everything in Kinsey’s life imploded and he died in 1956, only partially redeemed to the feeling that all of his work had been for naught. The insight on answering the question of where sex ends and love begins is something that can never be completely answered by science.

Before the advent of Playboy magazine, the Internet and Dr. Ruth, learning about pornography and masturbation was not mainstream. Kinsey opened society’s eyes and got folks talking. Even with the proclivity of casualness toward sex that dots the media, anyone interested in understanding American sexual hang-ups, which are still alive and well today, will enjoy the film.