There are basically four short movies, unfolding back-to-back(-etc.), that make up Alex Gibney’s Musk, an epic documentary that dumps a lot into our lap about its subject but never quite manages to dig as deep as the makers think it does. Then again, is there really any more to Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed engineer and ubiquitous cultural presence, who has been a part of our collective lives—as an entrepreneur, as a generally weird guy, as a political mover-and-shaker—for about 25 years? Gibney casts his net widely here, tracing Musk’s story from his upbringing in South Africa to the mess we’re in right now.
In fact, “widely” as an adverb to describe how the proverbial net has been cast is sort of an intentional understatement: The film runs four hours, including an intermission, and is cleanly divided between the two halves of Musk’s life, at least as we, his unwitting audience, have experienced it. There were the years when he was actually considered something of a prodigy with his companies designed to explore space and to revolutionize vehicle transportation, and then, there’s all the other stuff, which has either happened or come to light since the recent pandemic, involving his purchase of a major social media platform and his alliance with the current occupants of the White House.
This means, if we’re doing the math correctly, that each half contains two of those short movies (the film is even divided into labeled chapters of a sort, so one can compartmentalize a little less narrowly from there). The first two hours are devoted to his financial involvement with PayPal, which merged with an early project of Musk’s (with a familiar, single-lettered name) to combine the online payments system with the online financial services company, and the birth of SpaceX, which Musk desperately wanted to become a private-sector partner with the United States government apparatus. Both of these were successful ventures, leading to Musk fashioning himself as someone akin to an armor-suited hero out of comic books (he even had a cameo in the first movie sequel featuring that hero, after lobbying the studio heads).
In the second part of the first half, we begin to see the cracks in the surface as they reveal the ugliness underneath, with his essentially hostile takeover of Tesla Motors Inc. from Martin Eberhard (one of many talking heads here, all of which underline Gibney’s impressive level of access). That leads to chaos in the form of “cost-saving” deregulation that results in a shocking number of car-crash or car-related mortalities, as well as the face-saving litigation that likely locked out any potential near-victims or next of kin from being among the subjects for interview. It also, obviously, portends what is to come for the pretty odd, superficially goofy guy from the documentary’s title.
In case it isn’t obvious yet, the movie isn’t all that much of a revelation in terms of how Gibney has chosen to achieve what he seeks here: an exposé of Musk that will not offer too much more than what an encyclopedic search of the man might turn up. The cumulative power of all these things looped together, though, does afford it a certain, undeniably hypnotic quality, as if we’re helpless to watch as a fist clenches around our throat. The second half of this epic—the half with parts three and four of Musk’s story—is dramatically more rushed and less comprehensive than what came before (understandable on the latter count, since he’s still alive and everything, but less forgivable on the former), to be sure.
That’s probably because it catches up to the present, when we know a whole lot more about Musk’s personal and business affairs than we’d probably like. The personal affairs take over for a while, as we see the Kublai Khan-enamored Musk become obsessed with fathering a legion of children (Justine Musk, his ex-wife, and Ashley St. Clair, a reformed conservative social media influencer who made the wrong assumptions about the mythic figure she once admired, represent this aspect of his life, though there are at least three or four others by this critic’s recollection). The business affairs coincide with his increasing desire to control how the public sees him—or, at least, how much he sees about how the public sees him.
He buys Twitter, mostly as a joke and a favor to another ex-girlfriend, and destroys it much in the same way he later, after cozying up to President Donald Trump (after several years of, well, polite dismissal of him), takes a figurative chainsaw—literally wielded during one embarrassing public appearance—to the governmental apparatus that was in charge of investigating his companies and his lies. We know all this, and so even the illusion of illumination on Gibney’s part is a little bit of a pipe dream. We rather want to know a lot less, and we certainly feel the encroaching doom of where Musk’s future ambitions might lead.
The result is a big, brash, kind of hollow presentation of a man who is a big, brash, pretty hollow man in general. Musk mostly works, though, because it is comprehensibly constructed and engineered to the hilt in order to provide both a biography and a warning.
Rating: *** (out of ****)
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