In David Lynch: The Art Life, the heralded title director relays intimate psychological stories from his early life and painting career that must have inspired his films, but their relationship to each other is presented merely implicitly as opposed to sufficiently explicitly.

In the same way directors Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergard-Hol deftly handle the connection between his yarns and paintings, they should’ve juxtaposed his memory-describing words with excerpts from his actual claims to fame that potentially resulted from these tales.

Despite these flaws, I will never not celebrate documentaries that reveal insights into top-tier auteurs, but they’d be improved if the particular directorial style of each subject influenced their construction. One aspect of the flick elucidates this idea: since we rarely see Lynch speaking on camera, this separation of his words from his body captures the disembodied alienation that he and many of his characters often feel from themselves.