“The Cigarette Surfboard” is an upbeat travelogue documentary and surf picture about surfers turning into activists for cleaner oceans, and the power of ADHD creatives.

Surfer and industrial designer Taylor Lane is the subject of the film, a Santa Cruz surfer who got sick of seeing cigarette butts in the water while he was paddling out and carpeting the beaches back on dry land. He pitched in on beach cleanups.

When the non-profit Surfrider Foundation sponsored an “upcycling” contest, challenging creative people to turn surf area trash into art, Lane set out to build a surfboard out of those very same cigarette butts.

Building a board that soaked up seawater and almost sank led to later “Ciggy Board” models, and then efforts to improve their “surfability” — not just floating and not soaking up water, but “turning” — good enough boards that pro surfers like Mikey February and Rob Machado and Caity Simmers might ride them and raise awareness wherever they do.

And that “hold a mirror up to the ways we’re harming the ocean” sent Lane on a deep dive into surfing activism in the UK, Hawaii, South Africa, Fiji and Ireland.

Santa Cruz filmmaker friend Ben Judkins came along for the ride, filming some spectacular surfing footage and interviewing scores of surfers, “shapers” (board builders), academics and activists all over the seaside world.

The novelty of it all is the film’s hook — with a whiff of celebrity (surfer/singer-songwriter Jack Johnson), dashes of the hard science about the toxic nature of everything “cigarette,” including the plastic butts, and pro surfers reacting to the beauty of the boards and the message inherent in them, the “storytelling” they do.

The film includes some “we all share one ocean” idealism in its brief history of surf culture and of British surfing activism that got the UK to finally treat all that raw sewage it had been dumping into the ocean for centuries.

We see the trash pit that the “paradise” island of Fiji has become, and follow efforts to get seaside towns to ban the sale of single-use filter cigarettes.

It can play as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, and as self-serving — a creative with a gimmick surfing his flash of fame into a trip around the world, watching and sometimes surfing exotic coasts, from Fiji to western Ireland.

But optimism triumphs over cynicism as we sample Next Gen surfer argot and pick up on surfer idealism . The viewer can’t help but start to take Lane’s ethos to heart — that doing nothing isn’t optional, and that “don’t be afraid to be weird” is always in the origin story of innovation and culture-shifting change.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Taylor Lane, Jack Johnson, Hannah Bennett, Cliff Kapono, Mikey February, Steve England, Easkey Britton,

Credits: Directed by Ben Judkins A Kanopy release on Eventive.

Running time: 1:33