This documentary has some excellent things going for it: the stop motion reenactments of the collector’s stories are excellent, the subject of the doc is fully self-aware of his mania and treats it with good humor, and there’s a long runway of twists and turns–his even more abiding love of Star Wars, the competitive tension with his friend and heir, the compelling narrative about the commodification of childhood, his budding relationship late in life.
One of the things that didn’t sit well with Friends and me when we watched at a house on the Russian River was the way in which the documentarian tries to psychoanalyze and shoehorn an ending by coercing his subject into cutting off his vestigial limb of a collection/display room.
This story doesn’t have a big reveal at the end. There’s no sob story that’s going to scare you straight out of playing Pokemon Go or reading Reddit, and its fairly modest in its scope of Batman’s cultural relevance outside of a narrow band of years between 1987 and 1995, which was surprising, but not necessarily unwelcome.
