In my final year of university I met a graphic design student who’d recently returned to Australia after many years living and working in London. He was a lovely and talented guy, but that’s irrelevant. One morning Andy (sorry, yes, his name was Andy) handed me a little black zine. It was titled Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall by someone called Banksy.

Andy said he’d discovered it just the year before, slipped inconspicuously between a bunch of other art books on a shelf in the Tate Britain gift shop. He said that since he found it back then, he’d become a devotee of its creator – even going so far as collecting multiple posters of rats made by the artist (that are now worth a shit load) which he hunted down for sale in some tiny, shore side Bristol gallery space. He said I should read the zine, too.

I did read it. And I vividly remember thinking then, as I turned the end cover to close, ‘This guy is one gifted storyteller – with a style I’ve rarely seen before.’ ‘His art is great, sure, but…’ ‘He should be writing novels.’ ‘He should craft lyrics.’… ‘He should make an amazing film’, I thought.

Now, almost a decade later, Banksy has made a film. A documentary… sort of. And, much like his art, you’d be a fool to let it pass you by.

You’d also be foolish to think this film is set up to be anything like a straightforward biography. Exit Through The Gift Shop is, as it says on the poster, “a Banksy film”. That is, this is much less a film about Banksy, and much more a film made by his hand – with its famously sagacious, sobering and satirical touch.

From the outset, Banksy (hidden in shadow throughout, of course) sets the record straight, revealing direct-to-camera that Exit Through The Gift Shop is actually a film about Thierry Guetta – a fascinating, yet ordinary, Frenchman who once tried to make a film about Banksy. It’s an abrupt shift of premise from the get-go, and a subtle hint of more abrupt shifts to come.

Helped along by some wonderfully crisp narration (courtesy of Rhys Ifans), we learn that after years of floundering in passionless jobs in his settled home of Los Angeles, Guetta finally takes hold of a video camera - transforming him overnight into a relentless amateur videographer. And then, as if lightning was striking the Frenchman twice in quick succession, he stumbles – new camera in hand – into a subject truly worthy of being filmed: the fledgling global street art movement, opened up to Thierry by his cousin, the then little-known Space Invader. A beast is suddenly awakened.

Thierry rapidly fashions for himself the persona of a “documentary director”, manically pursuing his new found focus and childishly embracing all of the illegalities that go along with it. It’s an innocence and fervour that sees him smash through the street artists’ network of secrecy and into the ‘right-hand man’ position of, quite notably, Shepard Fairey (of Obey fame.) As his ascent gathers even greater pace and intensity in the company of Shepard, Thierry sets himself a new, even higher challenge: to meet and film his most coveted street artist of all, the notoriously elusive Banksy. And guess what? That he does.

With Banksy now in the picture, the strangely endearing Guetta really does appear to be capturing art history in the making. Literally thousands of MiniDV tapes in boxes soon come to fill the rooms of his house, teasing at being one of the greatest ever documentations of any known art movement. That is, until Banksy asks to see Thierry’s footage for himself.

To continue telling you any more would not only spoil what’s lies ahead, but would also be a tad redundant. After all, why hear the punch line from me when the truly arresting climax of this story is on screen for you to see for yourself? And with the highest recommendation I urge that you do. (All I will say is that the remainder does include an unforgettable glimpse of the film’s first edit before Banksy decides to make some adjustments – originally it was titled Life Remote Control – plus the introduction of one Mr. Brainwash, a rapidly emerging artist who packs the subtlety of an uppercut.) (If you really must know more, then you can find it written about explicitly pretty much everywhere else on the internet. But, personally, I think if you don’t know about the Mr. Brainwash connection already, you’ll be so much more satisfied to watch it unravel before you in a theatre than to have me explain it for you here.)

In a heady second-half spiral – wrapped tightly in a hilarious/depressing sheet of fame and fraudulence – Exit Through The Gift Shop gradually reveals itself to have all along been not so much a documentary, but instead a boiling, subversive and exacting work of Banksy art in itself; one of equal merit to anything the artist has ever sprayed on the outside wall of a pub. With stunning fluidity, the film exponentially explodes its focus again and again - from the obscure passions of a slightly mad Frenchman, to the revered work of a prominent artist, to, ultimately, a study of life’s great absurdities, our mindless consumption, exposure and celebrity, and an accomplished ridicule of a flimsy art world.

Since Exit’s debut at Sundance earlier this year, talk has been rife that many key elements and people in the story must have been staged. Or that, perhaps, the entire film is one bold, elaborate hoax – a parallel mockery of both the art and film industries in equal measure. Reports abound that Spike Jonze may have been the actual director of the film and, even, that Mr. Brainwash is, somehow, (don’t ask me how!), director Harmony Korine.

But what does any of that sensational rumour-milling matter anyway? Fact or fiction, Banksy’s message will resonate powerfully amongst audiences much the same. To let news of such a fine result as that become drowned out or dumbed-down amidst gossip of technicalities seems a great shame. And besides, I’m prepared to put all my money on ‘fact’.

As the film begins, Banksy hesitates to foretell any moral to the story we're about see. Yet, as the final curtain draws shut, no moral feels more coolly pronounced than that of truth is often stranger than fiction.

Exit Through The Gift Shop opens in cinemas this Thursday, June 3.
You can view the Exit Through The Gift Shop trailer here on TheVine.