We’ve entered a golden age of cock. Penis is everywhere, swinging ever more boldly into Judd Apatow movies, inching its way into at least two of this year’s best-picture Oscar nominees, and coming at you from all directions in Nymphomaniac.

In the next few months we’ll see the delicate subject of size examined in the documentary Unhung Hero, but it’s The Final Member, opening at the Rio Theatre on Sunday (March 16), that offers the grandest fusillade of wang with a visit to the most penisy location on Earth: the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Husavik.

There, Sigurður Hjartarson has lovingly curated close to 300 johnsons from across the animal kingdom. But he lacks one—a human.

Enter upstanding citizens Páll Arason and Tom Mitchell, both of whom are eager to donate. Mitchell is so eager that he’s willing to surgically separate from his little buddy—which is nicknamed Elmo and boasts a stars-and-stripes tattoo—right now. Arason, a legend in Iceland for his adventuring but also for his little black book of amorous conquests, would prefer to part ways after he dies. Given the fact he’s in his 90s, that could happen any day now.

"Superficially it seems sophomoric, maybe lascivious, maybe questionable,” says codirector Jonah Bekhor, discussing The Final Member during a call to the Straight from Los Angeles. “But the themes could not be more essentially human. It’s death, and the legacy of what we leave behind, and the question of autonomy, and the question of taboo, and the pursuit of dreams. The fact that it’s wrapped around the story of a penis museum was so absurd and amazing and unbelievable that it was something we just couldn’t resist.”

Indeed, after dispensing with the schoolboy humour, The Final Member overturns your expectations in any number of ways.

“All these guys in a way are pioneers and iconoclasts,” says Bekhor, “but with Siggi [Hjartarson], there really is a message behind everything he does. His entire life, whether he’s a celebrated teacher in Iceland, or he’s a guy who’s written or translated 22 books, or as a journalist, or as a general political rabble-rouser, his goal is to challenge things that he thinks are absurd.”

“Sigurður plays very wittily with this taboo,” adds Zach Math, joining his filmmaking partner on the line from California. As for the very strange man attached to Elmo, Tom Mitchell, Math describes him as “obscure to the point of hilarity, but there’s a sincerity and a real vulnerability about him that makes him this completely absurd but wonderful and fascinating character to follow.”

Mitchell’s absolute devotion to his dink—he’s busy developing a comic book about Elmo when we first catch up with him—is just one out of a host of apparently unwholesome pathologies attending the man. But again, he turns out to be much more sympathetic than we first assume. At the very least, suggests Math, “I think we strangely connect with Tom in being so taken with something that there’s almost an unknown power over you and your psyche.”

With Aranson described by Bekhor as “a braggart, a self-aggrandizing, hard-partying man’s man who could be a real difficult character”, the potential for conflict between these three alpha males is glaring. And then it comes. Bekhor recalls his excitement after the duo’s first trip to Husavik.

“I turned to Zack and I said, ‘You know what’s crazy about this situation? You have a guy, all he needs is one penis to complete this masterwork, this 40-year odyssey of collecting every specimen of every mammal. And you have a guy, all he wants is his penis to be that penis. But there’s so much acrimony, so much angst, their relationship is so difficult and contentious that it’s threatening to destroy their dreams in the process!’ And that, to me, was like…”

Documentary gold? There were only two possible outcomes to this scenario, adds Math: “Death or dismemberment.”

You’ll need to see the film to discover which if either comes first. We prefer to leave you dangling.