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Coulda Been FaulknerThe foremost burnout of the Paris Review generation.

By Troy PattersonPosted Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008, at 1:39 PM ET

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Doc, the film, might have slowed down a bit at this point to sort out some chronology and tell us more fully about its subject's cafe-society rambles, his labor-rights and free-speech agitations, and his Buckminster Fuller-lite scheme for utopian housing. It's a touch sloppy that way, and its production values can be downright homely—unforgivably bad lighting, weird framing choices, ill-chosen camera angles. (The audience is very interested in what William Styron has to say but somewhat less compelled by his wattle.) At points, however, the willful DIY quality and intimate home-movie vibe yields serendipitous results. When Immy Humes goes in search of a lost movie her father shot in the early '60s—Don Peyote, a psychedelic take on Cervantes meant to be scored by Ornette Coleman—she follows a false lead to filmmaker Jonas Mekas. This scene is, structurally speaking, pointless, but it's an utter delight to see the awesome stacks and shelves of film canisters in Mekas' endless basement archive. Immy, sharing this pleasure, turns the camera on herself and giggles like George Plimpton on hash.

The bad trip began in 1965, when Timothy Leary delivered a quantity of LSD to London, taking Humes' consciousness in the other direction. His paranoia acquired heaviosity, and his universe started making rather too much sense, as demonstrated by the notes and spiraling diagrams the documentary spookily shows us over a plaintive horn. He was beating his wife. When his family and friends had had enough of it, they told him that Queen Elizabeth wanted to see him, and his agent arranged a limousine to ferry him to a mental hospital. The wife and kids went back to the States. After Doc cooled out a bit, he did, too. His daughters found out that he was still alive after reading a New York Times story about a guy who was hanging around Morningside Heights, dispensing his inheritance to strangers $50 at a time.

Doc Humes spent the next long chapter of his life making mischief and holding forth, mostly in college towns, where there was always a fresh supply of young people eager to audit his freelance lectures—"his own floating university of Humesism" says one Oliver Trager, Bennington '79. None of them minded too much when he now and then accused them of being CIA agents. He seems to have met his second wife at a food co-op/massage academy/open classroom in Cambridge, Mass. Then he unraveled Howard Hughes-style for a while, and then got medicated and approachable, and then moved on.

In closing, Doc offers, a touch too triumphantly, the revelation that Humes was not entirely as crazy as everyone had thought. "It turned out that the U.S. government was keeping tabs on Doc for at least 30 years," goes the voice-over as snippets of his FBI file scroll past. (It's like an epitaph reading, "He was paranoid … but also important enough that they were after him!") Humes, in all his charm and madness, might have been served better by an anecdote relayed earlier by his friend Russell Hemenway. One day in Paris, Doc walked onto the terrace of the Brasserie Lipp and joined a group. "Somebody ask me a question," he said. "I feel like explaining something."