With a structure alone that sets it apart from the fraught-with-contemporary-failures category of biopics, Paul Shrader’s Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters is marvelous to behold, swelling with rhapsodic music, filled with gloriously textured images, and showing a conceit for genre stereotypes dictating that “accuracy” is the heart of biography, instead bearing faithfulness to Mishima’s own vision that truth is best conveyed through the marriage of literature and art, pen and sword, word and action, through whose union alone can beauty be born.
