On July 3, 2003, Doug Bruce, age 35, woke up on a New York subway train and realized he had no idea whom he was or how he got there.

Unknown White Male—a documentary directed by Bruce's friend, Rupert Murray, and made up of footage shot by both Murray and Bruce in the days, weeks, and months after Bruce's sudden amnesia—is, at this point, more famous as a debate: that is, whether or not Bruce is faking it. And for the first half hour or so, Unknown White Male is most interesting as a "believe it or not" experiment—do you take Bruce's extraordinary story at face value, or do you think that he's clowning on everyone he knows (and, by extension, on us)?

This initial distrust is especially unavoidable thanks to Murray's self-indulgent directorial style, which hovers somewhere between annoying abstraction and needless melodrama. But once Murray lets Bruce have the spotlight, the question of whether or not the filmmakers are jerking everyone around becomes, strangely enough, moot: Sure, some things don't quite add up, and a few things feel kind of strange. But validity becomes a secondary issue; Unknown White Male's main focus is watching Bruce interact with his friends, or meet his loving family and (re)discover the Rolling Stones as he stumbles and guesses and tries to discover who he was and who he is. "I don't know anything," he says at one point, noting that the longer his amnesia continues, the less he wants his memory to return. (Whom he was/is pretty rad, by the way—a wealthy stockbroker who retired by age 30 to take up photography, Bruce also has some super-hot girlfriends and a killer flat in New York.)

The writers' adage that there's no such thing as nonfiction—that an element of fiction will creep into any story, no matter how objective one attempts to be—seems particularly relevant throughout Unknown White Male. Enough is said in the film—in Bruce's facial expressions, in the awkward jokes of his confused friends, in the automatic, simple processes of life that catch Bruce off-guard—that whether or not he's faking becomes an overly simplistic way to look at the film: Unknown White Male's technical veracity isn't half as meaningful, or nearly as engaging, as the bigger truths that the film deals with.