Chop Suey is the name of a cook book Bruce Weber found on one of his photo trips and whose name he borrowed for his circle of artist friends that fetishize Peter Johnson, a high-school wrestler turned fashion model. Weber discovered Johnson and fell head over heels for him because the young man is beautiful, sexual and innocent, and because Weber is gay. The famous photographer never really comes out of the closet, even if this movie is as much about his personal life, his obsessions and his personality as it is about art and beauty.

The film is like a diary, a hodegepodge of original footage, clips from old tv shows, many photographs, studio conversations, hunks parading around in funky costumes or running on the beach naked with elephants. Visually enchanting, with A class editing, the movie is a fascinating and very personal look in Weber's world. It's hard to say how much of what's on the screen is honest because this visual homage to the photographer's life is created by Weber himself. Look for some signs of an overblown ego and pretentiousness, otherwise to be expected from such an acclaimed artist.

Apart from the beautiful, but "please don't speak", boy toy Peter Johnson, and some of his A&F friends, you meet a Brazilian jujitsu champ, an ex-junkie punk surfer, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, the singer and lesbian icon Frances Faye, Robert Mitchum, Diana Vreeland, not necessarily in that order. The stories about Faye and the footage of Mitchum in the recording studio are deeply felt and real, on a totally different level from the sequences of smooth hunky twinks swimming in a pool while wearing tootoos and playing with golden retrievers.