At the peak of its popularity in the 1980s, the innocuously named "Shashin Jidai" ("Photo Age") sold 350,000 copies a month. Edited by the self-made publishing impresario Akira Suei, the magazine featured cutting-edge photography by the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama and in-depth articles about underground culture, but most of its readers were just there for one thing: porn.

This was the era in which censorial prudishness forbade the depiction of even a single pubic hair, so editors had to get creative — and get good at apologizing. When we first meet Suei (Tasuku Emoto) in "Dynamite Graffiti," he's sat at a police station while an officer scrutinizes his latest issue, with the exasperation of a teacher reviewing a half-assed homework assignment.

"Are you mocking society?" the cop asks wearily, although if there's any lesson to be gleaned from Masanori Tominaga's rambling biopic, it's that society's moral guardians could afford to take themselves less seriously.