This enthralling puzzle of a movie appears at first to be a cinema vérité documentary, but look closely, and read the credits: it's a completely constructed, fictional world. McBride's truly unclassifiable feature functions as a knowing satire about the filmmaker's compulsion to capture everything on camera and also a wry character study of one young man who uses his "art" as a pretext for complete self-absorption. As played by Carson, David is on an irreconcilable mission: to at once understand a world in chaos, and to cocoon himself from it in his own cinematic world. His burning need to immortalize himself on film makes this one "Diary" worth peeking into.