(2009) Taking his video camera everywhere he goes, filming everything around him, in 1999 Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant with thick sideburns who owns a vintage clothing store in LA, visits his cousin in France where he stumbles into the underground world of street art.

His cousin, Space Invader, creates mosaic tiles and at night puts them up on buildings and other structures for display through the city, like "a gallery outside," while Thierry films them. The narrator Rhys Ifans explains Thierry's obsession with videotaping everything as a result of his being unaware at eleven of his mother's illness and absent at her death. Back in LA, Thierry continues documenting "the birth of a movement," says the narrator, "the biggest counterculture movement since punk," with his images attracting attention on the Internet.

During Space Invader's sojourn in LA, Thierry becomes acquainted with dozens of graffiti and other street artists, most importantly the most prolific of all, Shepard Fairey (famous for his portrait of Barack Obama and stickers of Andre "Obey"), with whom he travels around the world for eight months. "I'm a ghost when I'm with them," says Thierry, who serves as both documentarian and accomplice watching out for cops.

Still there's one street artist he's intrigued to find in the UK, the provocateur Banksy, who had stealthily attached his own works of stencils and stickers to the walls of art museums. "His work seemed to be everywhere," says the narrator, "but the artist himself remained as elusive as ever." Banksy's images painted on the wall separating Israel from the "West Banksy" focused international attention on him.

Interviewed on camera, Banksy, in a dark shadow with a hood over his head, his voice electronically disguised, begins to tell the story of how by a chance encounter he and Thierry met in LA with the Frenchman's making himself indispensable to the artist. Together they traveled to London, all the while Thierry ("He was like … I really liked him") recording with his camera.

After returning to LA and inspired by his experiences, Thierry, having an image stenciled of himself with a camera, puts up posters throughout the city. Banksy then reappears for his USA "Barely Legal" exhibition, including a live, painted elephant in the room; collectors show up, snapping up his pieces, and at auction the prices go up. When the two friends go to Disneyland, where Banksy "installs" an orange Gitmo-detainee inflated doll, Thierry gets taken by Mickey Mouse security guards for a four-hour interrogation.

Impressed by Thierry's coolness under pressure, revealing nothing of the caper, Banksy suggests that now's the time for Thierry's documentary. Never having watched or had any interest in watching the thousands of hours from his videotaping, the collection unorganized, Thierry patches together a 90-minute film he titles Life Remote Control - "an unwatchable nightmare of trailers," admits Banksy.

At this point Banksy takes charge of the tapes, becoming the filmmaker, while Thierry follows Banksy's advice to produce more of his own art in LA. Suddenly Thierry transforms himself into the street artist Mr Brainwash (MBW), investing everything he owns (as his wife Debora and their two children watch anxiously) to create hundreds of imitations of the works of Andy Warhol and the artists he's known for an "art amusement" to impress Banksy.

Crazy? Retarded? A joke or a genius? With a little help from his friends (distancing themselves afterward, expressing regret for having taken part in the outcome), he pulls everyone's leg off in this comedic documentary of graffiti artists. At the conclusion Mr Brainwash spraypaints the name of his exhibition in orange script, "Life Is Beautiful," onto a solitary brick wall in a field of debris before pulling the wall down, putting me in mind of Irish novelist Joyce Cary's artist Gully Jimson, who may have been the original street artist, in The Horse's Mouth.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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