This documentary explores the lives of 6 movie-crazed, teenage brothers who grew up locked away in a NYC housing project.

The Wolfpack, directed by Crystal Moselle. Screening at the Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge, MA.

One of the Angulo siblings acting out a scene from Christopher Nolan’s film “The Dark Knight” in the documentary “The Wolfpack.”

By Gerald Peary

A year earlier, one of the Angulo brothers tells The Wolfpack documentarian Crystal Moselle, they would never have talked to her. They would have remained dead silent if they met her on the street. They would have raced back to their apartment in a Lower East Side tenement, minding their parents’ warning not to dare speak to strangers. But it was 2010, and the six Angulos were starting to step out a bit, savoring the outside after a lifetime of being cooped up, home schooled, literally imprisoned by their paranoid, people-fearing mother and father.

As they raced down First Avenue, Moselle chased after them. Trying to engage them in conversation, she said the magic words: “Hi, I’m a filmmaker.” And the next thing, the movie-crazy Angulos invited Moselle into their home to film them with her video camera. That’s what she did for the next several years. The six exuberant brothers, though never their one sister (this is never explained), their mother, Susanne Angelo, bursting for conversation, and finally, Oscar Angulo, the hostile, reluctant patriarch.

This moving, troubling saga began, many years ago, in a romantic way. Susanne, a nice hippie girl from the Midwest, met the love of her life on the road to Machu Picchu. A Peruvian who was different and spiritual — Oscar, a Hare Krishna. They decided to travel to Scandinavia, with its utopian aura, but landed in New York City and stayed. Oscar had grand ideas of himself as a power figure, so he needed followers, a passive wife, and a flock of obedient kids. He gave them Sanskrit first names–Govinda, Bhagavan, Mukunda, Narayana, Jagadisa, Krsna—and decided that the streets of New York were too fearsome for them. Susanne agreed, as she’d always imagined they’d live in the green countryside, not a shabby, drug-riddled Manhattan high-rise. So the kids stayed home. Not even their mother had a key to their front door. “Our father overdid it. He was too worried, too concerned,” one of the boys tells Moselle. Well, how often did they get out? “Sometimes 9 times a year, sometimes once. One particular year, we didn’t get out at all.”

Their mother was their teacher. Their father, though tyrannical, introduced them to rock music by his favorites, including Ozzy Osbourne and Led Zeppelin. Surely more important, he brought VHS tapes and then DVDs into the apartment, endless movies. A night at the Angulos is and was the whole clan in the tiny living room watching a film on their TV. Enraptured. “If I didn’t have movies, life would be boring, no point to go on,” says one Angulo. Another has made an all-time Top 30 list, headed by The Godfather, Godfather 2, JFK, and the Ring trio. “Who doesn’t like Lord of the Rings?” he asks with a big grin.

As you might have noticed, I’m being vague about which Angulo said what. That’s because Moselle doesn’t provide the expected “lower thirds” identifying them. And with similar ponytails, dark shades, toothy smiles, they look much alike. Is that the filmmaker’s point, that their personalities have blurred into one, that they are an undifferentiated wolf pack? I don’t know.

I’ll admit it. I’m not sure if it’s Mukunda or Govinda who was the most courageous, who dared to walk out by himself into the world several years before the others, enraging their dad. It’s definitely Govinda who is the most film-serious, who gets a PA job for a movie company, and then comes home to direct an avant-garde work, starring not only his family but a gorgeous, Cybill Shepherd–like teen blonde. Yes, he brings her into the home. And we see Govinda as the director, daring to touch his actress’s arm. What a breakthrough!

But how did Govinda get a film job? He doesn’t say so, but seemingly the only way with his inexperience would be for the filmmaker to have arranged it. Is that OK for a documentarian to do? And how do all the guys get thin ties and dark sports jackets so they can walk in the street like characters from Reservoir Dogs? Where did the money come from for six cool outfits? From the director? And when Susanne suddenly calls her mother after 50 years: could that have happened without the prompting and coaxing of Moselle? And what about the Angulo boys’ first trip on a train, first trip to the beach? Weren’t these set up by the filmmaker? Most contrived of all is a voyage of the whole Angulo family, including their agoraphobic mom and dad, to an orchard in the country for some apple picking.

There have been skeptics in the press, naysayers, who view The Wolfpack as a semifiction. A Salon reporter dismissed it as “as real as Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” That’s a little harsh because, let’s face it, even the most pure and honorable of documentarians contrive at points to get their subjects to do and say what the filmmakers need them to do and say. Probably, Moselle does it too much and in too obvious a way. She gets caught. Anyway, I forgive her for a scene which she probably arranged but which is brilliant anyway. That’s when the six Angulos dress up carefully and beautifully, are each kissed at the door by their anxious mom before their big adventure. It’s going for the first time to see a film in an actual movie house. Heading to the multiplex.

The power of cinema! Afterward, they come out beaming. One Angulo speaks for all. He says these precious ingenuous words, beyond the capabilities of any screenwriter: “That was a good good good movie. I’m going to remember it for a long time. Our money is going to David O. Russell or Christian Bale: that’s awesome!”

Gerald Peary is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of 9 books on cinema, writer-director of the documentary For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism, and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess.