BRADLEY THOMPSON: You Can See Nothing.

As a “documentary,” you learn nothing about how or why Holmes started Theranos, you learn virtually nothing about Theranos’s development of their wonder device, and you learn nothing about the trial in which Holmes was found guilty of defrauding customers and investors. Instead, you get to hang out for four weeks with a neutered ménage à trois of self-absorbed, millennial strivers at a California beach house. Can you imagine anything more tedious or interminably boring!?!?! In the end, the film is a cross between François Truffaut’s 1962 Jules et Jim and Robert Klane’s 1993 Weekend at Bernies II.

The self-promoted premise of this not-true-to-life “documentary” is radical transparency but in a dark, shadowy, brooding, film-noir sort of way. But there is nothing transparent about this fictional account of reality other than the utterly depraved worldview of postmodern millennials and millennial postmodernism. The whole thing has that edgy, avant-garde, NYU film-school vibe to it. It’s all about being clever, all-too-clever.

Here’s the storyline.

Thirty-four days before she is about go off jail to serve her 11-year sentence, Elizabeth Holmes and her live-in boyfriend, Billy Evans, invite Fielder and his film crew into their home virtually 24-7 right up until the moment she goes off to prison. Half of the film (and yes, I’m calling it a film rather than a documentary) is set at the couple’s rented Del Mar, California beach house. The couple has a toddler and a nursing baby, who, you might think, deserve the full attention of their self-obsessed parents.

Let’s stop right there and ask the obvious question: Who does that? Seriously, what kind of human being would want a film crew and a creepy interlocutor encamped in their house ‘round the clock as they’re about to experience the worst moment of their lives? Normal people would, of course, want privacy. Normal people would want to spend every remaining second with their children, but we’re not talking about normal people. We’re talking about postmodern millennial narcissists.

Every scene of this tawdry melodrama screams, “Look at me, look at me, look at me! I’m important, don’t ya know?”

From Let It Be to Gimme Shelter to Hail, Hail Rock & Roll, to The September Issue, the 2009 look back at Vogue and the sneering pomposity of Anna Wintour just before the dead tree publishing industry hit the big iceberg, as Kyle Smith wrote, the magic of the documentary format is simple: “Convince somebody that you’re going to make them a big-screen star, then let them hang themselves.”