Nuts! (2016) - Penny Lane

Penny Lane's Nuts! is a playful, invigorating documentary about Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an eccentric man of intelligence who built an entire empire of medicine due to his goat-testicle impotence cure and his pioneering use of radio.  Featuring a host of cinematic techniques which include animated reenactments, interviews, archival footage, and a somewhat unreliable narrator, Nuts! is a highly enjoyable story of one man's entrepreneurial rise to a place of celebrity and influence in the 1920s.  Penny Lane's Nuts! is the type of documentary that is best to go into knowing as little as possible, given that one of the film's greatest attributes is its ability to manipulate the viewer.  I'm trying to keep things somewhat vague in this regard, as the less you know the better, but lets just say that I haven't seen a film in awhile that played with my perceptions of the world so effectively, only to expose the truth in a way that left me quite startled by its conclusion.  Nuts! as a documentary is a great example of the power of convincing narrative structure, a film that is utterly believable in its early David vs. Goliath story that finds Dr. Brinkley fighting for the common man against his perceived oppressors, the status quo, only to pull the carpet out from underneath the viewer and reveal the true subversive nature of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley's medical empire.  Documentary filmmaking more so than any other genre of film can fall victim to lazy filmmaking, but Nuts! never comes close to relying solely on its unique story, embracing its absurd subject matter to tell this tale with vigor and imagination.  Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Penny Lane's Nuts! is that by the end of the documentary it becomes clear that the film itself is simply mirroring that of its primary subject, delivering a convincing set of circumstances that effectively cons the audience into believing its well-intentioned narrative, a very similar practice to how Dr. Brinkley himself rose to prominence.  Playful, eccentric, and utterly manipulative in the best possible way, Penny Lane's Nuts! is an imaginative and fascinating documentary that shouldn't be missed. 

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