As a young queer person struggling with his gender identity, director Sav Rodgers latched on to an unlikely source: Kevin Smith’s 1997 rom-com Chasing Amy. The film has been controversial with the queer community since the time of its release because of its relationship to bisexuality, lesbianism, and those communities. It has a complicated legacy, to put it mildly. With a mix of earnestness and hyper verbal indie quirk, Chasing Amy made the world take Smith seriously as a filmmaker after the failure of his sophomore feature Mallrats, but it arguably did so at the expense of queer filmmakers. While Rodgers’s film begins as a celebration of the place Chasing Amy held for him as a young man, it evolves into something far more complex that grapples with the underlying heartbreak of Chasing Amy’s development, its influence on Rodgers’ gender transition, and his changing relationship to the film and Kevin Smith. Equal parts love letter and critique, this unique documentary is a must-watch.

Featuring illuminating, candid interviews with Amy alumni Smith, Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Lee, and one of the unexpected inspirations behind the film — Lesbian cinema icon Guinevere Turner — it’s fascinating to watch Rodgers’ film shift and expand into a more complex treatise on queerness, fandom, and the Hollywood system than even Rodgers may have expected at the start. Like some of the best documentaries of years past, the filmmaker’s journey is altered significantly by the messiness of real life. Perhaps not everyone in Chasing Amy can give us a warm remembrance of it, but Rodgers nimbly adapts the story — and his own life — at every turn to craft a portrait of an artist coming into his own over several ultimately rewarding years.