Producers: JJ Eisenman, Hadrian Belove and Alex Lee Moyer Director: Alex Lee Moyer Cast: Alex Jones, Owen Shroyer, Rob Dew, Ali Alexander, Mike Hanson and Rex Jones Distributor: Play Nice
Grade: C-
A hagiographical portrait of Alex Jones would seem a stretch, but that’s pretty much what Alex Lee Moyer offers in her quasi-documentary of the InfoWars provocateur, which is basically an autobiographical apologia (in the original sense, with no regrets) by its subject.
Moyer would undoubtedly respond that she does not intend to present an airbrushed portrait of the controversial, bombastic right-wing broadcaster/huckster, that she’s merely following the template of other documentarians who have eschewed context and commentary in favor of providing a platform for Jones to express himself in his own way (through what might be called pieces of performance art as well as words). Of course what results is less a rounded, much less nuanced, depiction than an obviously calculated one—which, whatever the director’s claims to a “hands off” approach might be, is skewered by her editing alone in support of Jones’s portrayal of himself as a free-speech warrior against the globalist plot to establish a New World Order.
So while covering Jones’s participation in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, the footage selected has him exhorting marchers to act “peacefully” over and over again, and when his denials of the reality of the Sandy Hook massacre are mentioned, they’re always accompanied by his assurances that they were merely intended as speculations about what his “gut instinct” led him to suspect. In the end, he’s given free rein to depict himself as a victim—of those who have tossed him off internet platforms and those who are suing him (successfully, as recent court cases have shown)—rather than as a the sinister, money-grubbing figure his critics have alleged.
In short, this is a film that will enrage those who see Jones as dangerous while enthralling those who see him as heroic.
It does have points of interest even for Jones-haters, though, particularly in covering his childhood in the Dallas area (he was raised in Rockwall, the same town twenty miles northeast of the Metroplex that the phony drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, aka John Bloom, supposedly comes from), and his early career. And whatever the intention, the overall effect is to show him as a bellowing, bullying guy, and some episodes—like old footage in which he and confederate Mike Hanson supposedly infiltrated a meeting of a secret NWO society of elites in California where a child was sacrificed—will be positively risible except to his cultists. Jones’s attempts to downplay the conduct that might have negative legal consequences for him, moreover, come across as not just self-serving but pretty desperate.
This could be a useful way for those who have never watched InfoWars to see what Alex Jones is all about. Its combination of interviews (with Jones and his small staff), archival material and new footage is fairly conventional, though not always stitched together very slickly; and at over hour hours it’s surely overlong. But the total reliance on Jones makes it a thoroughly one-sided affair, and viewers are advised to look elsewhere for some much-needed balance in deciding whether he’s the committed truth-seeker he claims to be, or just the greedy conspiracy-spouting carnival barker so many see him as.