The sex is real in John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus; only the setting—an animated New York cityscape, watched over by a fluorescent Statue of Liberty—is fake. To an extent, that describes the movie: a sexually daring, dramatically timid roundelay that employs unsimulated twosomes, threesomes, and even solos for skin flute in the service of subplots reminiscent of late-night-cable soap. Yet there's something refreshingly frisky and celebratory about Shortbus that offsets its flaws. It's a triple-X midnight movie with a heart of squarest gold.