Word on the street is that Exit Through the Gift Shop—supposedly a new documentary, supposedly directed by British street artist Banksy—is a hoax. You can get your noggin in a real holding pattern lingering over this one; but the more revolutions I make, the closer I get to the debunkers’ point of view. Still, I suggest you enjoy the movie on its own terms first, before running out of fuel, and crashing into its art-world Bermuda Triangle.

But how can you distrust a face like Banksy’s? Or, more precisely, the shadow that eclipses the hooded figure’s visage—an effect complemented by the vocoder veiling his Da Ali G accent? This lack of image is Banksy’s style: anonymous, save for the skater-boy hoodie. Although he does this for legal reasons—his scabrous, caustic artwork is, by design, spray-painted on canvases that he technically doesn’t own—it’s also an affront to the art-world “establishment”: He’s Kool Aid to the cults of personality that he accuses them of enshrining. Ruefully, however, he claims responsibility for one of its newest celebrities: Thierry Guetta, a.k.a. Mr. Brainwash.

As the pseudonym implies, Thierry is as opaque as Banksy’s black-out. The French emigree, living in Los Angeles, has does’ eyes and doughy cheeks, topped off with squirrel’s-tail mutton-chops that have long outlived their ironic bite, and a fedora off the Hot Topic rack. I interpret these as warning signs. After spending several years as the local street-art scene’s resident videographer—documenting Shepard Fairey and others as they went about their nocturnal raids—Thierry turned his camcorder toward the movement’s most famously elusive figure; he’d make his Banksy & Me. The Briton, however, cooperated; he’d found a Robin for his Batman. But documentarian and subject were fated to switch roles. After watching Thierry’s rough cut of the footage, Banksy suggested, in the most anodyne terms possible, that the Frenchman concentrate on another medium. The intention was to send Thierry on a wild goose chase; but the goose laid golden eggs—or, in Banksy and Fairey’s opinion, rotten eggs: Pop-art shells with nothing inside them. And yet, thanks to self-publicity, publicity, publicity, collectors and connoisseurs not only appeared in droves for the amateur’s boffo début, but gobbled up work and artist whole.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a perfect demonstration of how imagination, talent, and meaning are no match for drive, self-promotion, and networking—too perfect. The public buys up Banksys, and Banksy, renegade from his anarcho-socialist scene for selling out, sneers at the buyers; if his work is used as a commodity, then it’s been tragically misunderstood. When we see his work auctioned off at Sotheby’s, or mounted in private collections beside Picassos and Monets, we’re not shown how it’s gotten there—has it been scraped off billboards or has Banksy put it on the market himself? (Early on, if his work ended up in museums, it was explicitly without the curators’ consent.) When he holds his first show, the media is only interested in a live, painted elephant; to them, it raises questions about whether the artist abuses animals rather than what it was intended to symbolize (ironically, major issues that people tend to ignore even when confronted with them). As Banksy, ever humbly, declares, this movie is about Thierry—not himself; but his own history, used as context, is more relevant than he cares to admit. He’s using the film to rebuild his street cred. If it’s a hoax, then he’s literally Mr. Brainwash’s alter ego, counterfeiting his own work to make a statement. But even if the movie’s genuine, Thierry is still set up as Banksy’s evil twin; Banksy may have caught on with the public, but—hey guys, I’m still cool! How does someone anathema to hype learn to toot his own horn? Subliminal advertising—subliminal maybe even to himself.

In a movie about the importance of an artist’s intentions, the artist’s intentions are important. But one’s sense of phoniness would have to be as rigid as Holden Caulfield’s if one were to write off Banksy entirely for being guilty of my charges. (Or, as I personally doubt, one would have to think him an utter mountebank—riding graffiti as an escalator to success. The problem with irony of this magnitude is that it could well have been perpetrated by a sour reactionary, intent on tricking the “knowing” by pandering to their smugness in a scam to sell tickets. Then again, Elvis could be alive and well, and shacking up with Osama bin Laden.) He’s ensnared in the same cage that Michael Moore rattled in Capitalism: A Love Story; but how can he go on creating artwork that’s meant to shake the core of capitalism if he can’t scrounge up the scratch to produce it? And if he’s making bank with the movie, that’s okay with me. He’s not just using his fame to snatch a director’s chair: As a novice documentarian, he’s got quite a bit of talent. And as a novice screenwriter, with a knack for character and narrative sense, he’s even better.

Some have speculated that the “documentary” ends, and the fiction begins, when Thierry works on his show with Banksy’s blessing. But, if he’s a fraud the whole way through—the notion that the secretive artists allowed him to shoot them in flagrante delicto serves to bolster this theory—he’s perfectly cast. His Gallic mysticism seems particularly salient following Man on Wire, and it makes him hard to read. Is there a buffer between Thierry’s introspective pensées and the Jacques Cousteau-scented hot air that leaks out? Early on, he likens himself to a shadow; when he films the artists at work he’s a veritable non-entity, observer rather than commentator—a hint of his Warhol rip-offs to come. Thierry’s initial filmmaking style—aimlessness—also runs parallel to the Pop star, who “directed” static motion pictures (though the epigone’s editing style—resembling filler from an M.T.V. reality show on Benzedrine—is vapid in a different way). Gift Shop suggests that Thierry’s camerawork is compulsive, and digs into his past—the death of his mother, while he was young and unaware of her illness—to diagnose it. I think this is a likable trait. Thierry may not have the talent of an artist, but he has the sensibility of one; and one key reason why this film works is that Thierry is not a flimflammer or greedy exploiter so much as a holy fool.

But, most importantly, Gift Shop is funny. It can be a little too snarky, smug, and even superior at times; but, given its targets, and the genuine baleful ambivalence it dredges up, that only serves to certify it hip. Sure, it’s a self-serving manifesto for street art; and yessiree, Thierry’s night-vision footage could be counterfeit Jackass; but, even if simulated, these clips exude the energy, the novelty, of seeing a mangy counterculture sucking in its first gasps of air. Some effects, such as the way Thierry’s childhood tragedy is brought into the mix, aren’t quite convincing; Banksy, and the narrator (Rhys Ifans, of Pirate Radio and Greenberg—an appropriate choice), just can’t play sentimental. But the change in timber between the set-up of Mr. Brainwash’s 2008 expo and its aftermath—in which the tone shifts from being ulcerous with worry for Thierry’s impending confrontation with reality to bemused high spirits, vectored like a hipster’s feigned enthusiasm for the World Cup at the art gala’s you’re-shitting-me outcome—is sedulously engineered, particularly if it’s staged.

As I exited through the concession stand, I didn’t want this film to be a forgery. I hated seeing those frazzled browsers of Mr. Brainwash’s pop-cultural enfilade trying to exhume from a bottomless pit the deeper meaning of a MacBook Pro overlaid in Edward Hopper’s Automat, not knowing they’d been had. (The show, by the way, was not a hoax; but it’s been suggested that Gift Shop’s receipt of Brainwash’s sales runs high, like the doctored price tags at Thierry’s boutique.) Yet, camera trained on our faces and microphone jammed down our throats, wouldn’t many of us have bullshat similarly? Peer pressure and hype bully well beyond high school, and refugees from art class are hardly immune. Who wants to seem square, sagging, aesthetically senile? It may be a joke on the spectators, a joke on L.A. Weekly for lunging head-first onto the bandwagon, and a joke on us in the audience, lulled into accepting the “truth” at face value. But maybe cranky Banksy’s critique is too illuminating to be merely bitter. One wearies of Thierry after awhile, but I think we’re meant to like him, and—to a degree—appreciate his hard work. Banksy, whether scammer or culture jammer, knows better than to let us think that art is sold by an evil cabal of tastemakers with philistine machinations; it’s by luck, and showmanship, and our weaknesses for both. In a sense, Banksy’s at one with Breathless; it can be hard to find guilty parties when bad art is the crime.