The Imposter is one of those too-strange-to-be-true tales that's like manna for documentarians. In the early 1990s, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared from his Texas home, only to turn up four years later in Madrid. Or so his family thought. Or so they maybe thought. Because the "kid" in Spain claiming to be Nicholas Barclay was really 23-year-old con artist Frédéric Bourdin, who just happened into the right story, a US passport, and a seemingly new identity. Frédéric's tale has enough salacious pulp that it remains interesting despite director Bart Layton's heavy-handed filmmaking. Layton overdoes it with the reenactments, staging whole scenes and getting clever with the way he syncs Bourdin's real narration with the teenage actor playing him in flashbacks—to such a degree I started to fear that maybe I was getting conned, too.