A meta-documentary shows us what viewers really want from the genre, and how problematic that can be.

Nuts!, directed by Penny Lane. At the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, July 28 through August 6.

American scam artist John R. Brinkley — the subject of the documentary “Nuts!.”

By Neil Giordano

A documentary that opens with an animation of two goats humping has a lot going for it, and that rollicking irreverence is compounded by a story that’s so weird that you don’t quite believe what you are seeing. And that’s the point. The beauty of Penny Lane’s documentary Nuts! is that it genially sends up the documentary genre itself, playing on our conventional assumptions that we will learn the facts, while undercutting those expectations with mischievous glee.

On the surface, Nuts! is a biographical documentary, an example of the Great Man yarn. Its hero is Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an innovative medical doctor, a radio pioneer, a one-time gubernatorial candidate, and the epitome of the American dream. During the Roaring Twenties and the Depression, his rags-to-riches story follows a well-known arc: after an early life of poverty he rises on his own to great wealth and fame through the stalwart powers of his own mind. Goats are the key to his success: Brinkley made his name performing thousands of procedures in which he grafted goat testicles into men’s bodies, purported to cure sexual dysfunction, impotence, and infertility. From his operating room in tiny Milford, Kansas, Brinkley became a nationwide phenomenon, soon buttressed by his foray into radio broadcasting, in which he hosted his own popular show about sexual dysfunction: he answered listeners’ mailed-in questions and created a community of musicians, storytellers, and hucksters to fill out the station’s programming.

Accused of being a quack by the AMA, Brinkley was eventually stripped of his medical license, and shortly afterward lost his radio license. But Brinkley fought through adversity. He ran as a third-party candidate to be become governor of Kansas (he was ahead in the polls, but lost due to political chicanery by the major party candidates). Brinkley then relocated to the Mexican border and rebuilt his radio empire, bringing his voice to a wider audience with a massive radio tower that could reach thousands of miles.

All of this information is brought to us via the usual documentary techniques: a David McCullough-like narrator; talking head interviews; stock photos as well as video and audio clips; and reenactments, created by a variety of talented animators, of crucial episodes from Brinkley’s life, Yet, it’s these animations — not least the goats humping at the start –that give you an inkling that something might be amiss. These grand visions of Brinkley rising from the ashes of defeat; his powerful, drawling voice re-created in voice-over; the one-man-versus-the-world story arc: it all feels very pat and prepackaged. And that’s because it is.

Nuts! explicitly states at the start that it’s based on a biography of Brinkley, and movie loyally follows the chapters of the book. What we don’t find out until the third act is that the tome was commissioned by Brinkley himself. The story is true only in that it’s the story that Brinkley wanted told. That’s where the fun really begins. Was what we have just seen true? What was embellished? What fabricated? It turns out that Brinkley was a consummate scam artist; he never had a medical degree and made his living through fleecing rubes in fly-by-night medicine shows and other forms of hucksterism. He did settle in Kansas and (truthfully) became famous as the “goat-gland” doctor.

A animation from the film “Nuts!,” screening at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Thus in its third act the narrative reverses direction. The skeptical tone suggested by the opening tongue-in-cheek animations dominates once we backtrack into the ‘true’ story of the flim-flam man John R. Brinkley. Nuts! deconstructs the “Great Man” model and becomes a commentary on the documentary form itself and on our notions of truth and of history. Who do we accept to be an authority? Why do we find the typical heroic story arc, typified by Brinkley’s ersatz biography, so satisfying?

These questions, and others, linger in the aftermath of viewing Nuts!. I found myself scratching my head from the first 10 minutes, trying to parse the facts from the performance. Nuts! suggests that truth and the fiction are inextricably bound. At first, this idea was amusing. And then I began to wonder what it meant in the real world. Is a filmmaker’s authority simply created by using the tropes of the genre? Talking Heads = Truth? Are we being hoodwinked by documentaries? How much does editing establish credibility? (Nuts! won a Special Jury Award at Sundance for its editing). Director Lane’s most recent film was the ingenious Our Nixon (2013), which, via the magic of editing, created a convincing storyline out of nothing but home movies by Richard Nixon’s aides.

Earlier this year, Lane raised some of Nuts!‘s points about fact and fiction to a controversy raised by the screening of a non-fiction film. She published an open letter in Filmmaker Magazine decrying the choice by Robert DeNiro and the Tribeca Film Festival to screen Vaxxed, a documentary with an anti-vaccination message. She objected, in part, because the film’s director was none other than Andrew Wakefield, the doctor whose research, now discredited, linked vaccines to autism. Wakefield, like Brinkley, had lost his medical license yet, amazingly, he was still given a prime-time slot to spread his discredited theories. Lane’s anger wasn’t aimed at Wakefield but at the higher-ups at Tribeca. They should have been more skeptical — about safe assumptions regarding the documentary genre, about authority and facts, and about what we choose to believe.

Neil Giordano teaches film and creative writing in Newton. His work as an editor, writer, and photographer has appeared in Harper’s, Newsday, Literal Mind, and other publications. Giordano previously was on the original editorial staff of DoubleTake magazine and taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.