The first thing that may strike you as you watch Hunger, British director Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 "dirty strike" and subsequent hunger strikes by IRA members locked up in Maze Prison that ended with ten deaths by starvation, is how aware you of the physicality of the bodies onscreen. You don't have to see a hell of a lot of movies before you become accustomed to the people on screen lacking the weight and gravity of real human beings, and stop thinking of them as being composed of flesh and blood and having nerve endings. That's just a natural consequence of seeing so many films where the people are basically props, and where the heroes can stoically bounce back from any amount of punishment. Somehow McQueen, a gallery artist with extensive filmmaking experience who's making his debut here as a director of features meant for theatrical release, rights the balance, keeping you conscious of the characters' physical powers and limitations, and the effect is disorienting and not a little subversive. It's also harrowing, because Hunger is a movie in which just about everything those bodies experience is unpleasant.

The long, mostly wordless first section of the movie is a visceral evocation of prison conditions, made all the worse by the strikers' decision to try to punish their captors by making their day-to-day existence as bestial as possible. Refusing to wear prison uniforms because they reject being classified as criminals rather than prisoners of war, the IRA men are herded into their cells naked, where they store up their urine to pour under the doors of their cells; one man paints his wall with feces. The movie's nominal hero, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), has his biggest scene in this section when he resists the guards who are out to cut his shaggy hair and beard and gets into an altercation with a guard (Stuart Graham) who responds in kind after Sands throws a punch at him. It all builds to a scene in which the prison is invaded by the riot squad, who stir up a hellish cacophony banging on their shields with their batons and then use the batons to bang on the prisoners as the prisoners are pulled from their cells and made to run the gauntlet. This is a brilliant, radical piece of filmmaking, and it probably goes on for just about as long as most viewers would be able to take it. ("Most" does not mean the same as "all", and there were a few walkouts during the first half hour when I saw the movie.)

In the brief second act, McQueen shifts gears. This section is a conversation between Fassbender's Bobby Sands and a priest, played by Liam Cunningham, that begins with a single seventeen-make take as the to men lob misdirection and ethical arguments across a table. Whatever this scene introduces into the movie, it's not the feel of real life. Just the opposite: it's a theatrically heightened exchange that may have grown all the more actorish as the Fassbender and Cunningham worked together to make sure they had their lines down so as not to blow the take. (The two of them reportedly moved in together for a while so they could rehearse a dozen times a day.) But after the lack of dialogue in the first act, one latches onto it gratefully. It's there to give Sands a chance to explain his strategy--the hunger strikers begin fasting days apart from each other, so that instead of one big splash in the newspapers, there'll be a steady chain of new martyrs--and argue about the morality of what they're doing. The priest argues that what Sands and his comrades are planning is suicide, plain and simple; he doesn't make much of an effort to argue that, as IRA soldiers, they're already part of an organization devoted to immoral terrorist activity, or that by turning themselves into poster children for the cause they're encouraging more violence, which may have be a key to what makes the film as problematic as it is remarkable, especially when (to my mind) it goes off the rails in the final act.

The last part of the movie is, basically, a death watch. Words dry up again and the csmera looks on as Sands slowly wastes away. He lies in bed looking emaciated, rises and struggles to bathe himself, is visited by a doctor who apparently confirms that he's healthy for a dying man, and goes back to silently wasting away. Fassbender lost forty pounds for this section, and it's painful to watch him here, as it was to watch Christian Bale after he'd starved himself to a skeletal condition in The Machinist. He doesn't have to go through the exertions that Bale did, but once again, McQueen's special focus on the limitations and vulnerabilities of the suffering human body makes you intensely aware of the effort it takes for him just to climb into a tub. I'm never entirely comfortable with this sort of self-mutilation passing for acting, and it's all the more queasy-making here for the way that the movie seems to be nominating Sands for sainthood. The light he's bathed in signals "religious experience"; the near-death flashback to his childhood links his final moments to a story about how, as a boy, he took on the role of scapegoat for those he saw as his brothers. In a recent New York Times interview, McQueen specifically dismissed the idea that the sequence turns Sands into a Jesus figure, saying that " “It’s a naked skinny guy dying — sort of unavoidable. People mythologize it because that’s easier to digest.”

Such statements seem disingenuous, and so does the film's claim to be apolitical. It's an open question whether it's a good idea to make an apolitical film about the death of a terrorist, but for much of Hunger's running time, McQueen succeeds in making it so strong an evocation of pure, painful experience that it can't be easily shrugged off. But are these entirely aesthetic choices, or are they to some extent politically motivated? Are the dialogue sections that deal with Sands's choices about how he's lived his life and fought for what he believes in limited to the argument of whether he has the right to kill himself because audiences might find him less appealing, in a non-threatening rebel way, if he also explained why he thinks his organization has the right to carry out bombings and assassinations? The guard who bloodies Sands up while in the course of barbering him is killed by IRA gunmen while paying a visit to his senile mother in a rest home; maybe this scene is meant to be appalling, but in context, it looks a little like a bullying cop getting what's coming to him. One of the few voices we hear in the opening section is that of Margaret Thatcher, droning on in her sneer of a voice about her refusal to negotiate with the striking prisoners. It's hard to believe that McQueen thinks that playing that voice on the soundtrack, and contrasting it with the prisoners' noble silence, won't automatically get a lot of people on the prisoners' side.

Much of Hunger counts as an extraordinary experience. In its totality, it stands as a warning about the limits of reducing complicated moral and political issues to "experience": whether McQueen admits it or not, his omission of a fuller historical context turns this into a story about men punishing themselves for what they believe in. You may have to be quite the abstractionist to buy into the idea that what they believe in isn't important, and you'd have to be more naive than McQueen might plausibly be not to see that it's almost implicit in the scheme of things that the cowering, naked prisoners must be right and the baton-waving officers who represent the government led by the woman with the Wicked Witch voice must be wrong. It's not the movie's choice of sides that bothers me; it's the way that it presents itself as being above taking sides while it's clearly doing just that. And it punishes the audience (and trashes the issues it raises) in the last section; the transmutation of Bobby Sands into a plaster saint is a conceit unworthy of the artist that McQueen shows himself capable of being earlier in the movie. In a movie culture starved for real daring, Hunger is a real achievement and not to be missed. But it's also not to be swallowed whole.

Related: Trailer Review: Hunger