Movie Nation

Well, it’s got to be worth a few laughs, right?

A martial arts sci-fi thriller with Nicolas Cage in the Nic Cage role — “He knows I’m crazy. There’s no HONOR in killing crazy!”

Set in Burma, “Jiu Jitsu” was filmed in Cypress, another dividend from that “Cypress: It’s not just for money-laundering any more” film commission campaign.

The first images are of a guy fleeing…something — with these digital Ninja throwing stars “zing zing” zinging by him.

The first words, when this wounded guy (Alain Moussi) is dropped off with the off-the-books U.S. Army group in country, are uttered by a Sergeant who sounds like Lindsey Graham’s less masculine Carolina cousin.

This indie nonsense staggers along, letting us know that our survivor has amnesia, that the Army has him but this other “team” led by Frank Grillo “had” him, that there’s something radioactive in Burma’s “Valley of the Temples,” and the guy’s actual name is “Jake,” and he has a martial artist mercenary girlfriend (JuJu Chan).

Brawls ensue. Tony Jaa is here, and Ricky Yune.

“Who WERE those Jedi Knights who just took out my unit?”

And then, Thank the Maker, Nicolas Cage Himself shows up, in full Dennis-Hopper-in-“Apocalypse-Now” regalia. Who’re you?

“I’m YOU…in a few years, if you don’t get your s–t together!”

“You look puzzled! ARE you puzzled? I get it. I’M PUZZLED.”

Cage is here to explain first, himself, how he gets along, living in a cave.

“I’ve got my hobbies. I make hats outta newspapers. It’s an art…AND a craft!”

He also pulls together all the snippets of story, the misinterpreted locals who fear what shows up every time a six year comet returns to Burmese (Cypriot) skies. Sure, we’ve seen first-person shooter point-of-view footage as Jake escapes one “unit” and stumbles into other. But then there’re all these heads-up infrared targeting shots. SOMEthing is hunting them. All of them.

It’s the Alien Predator who “brought the world jiu jitsu.” And he comes back, every six years, “looking for a fight.”

Only the best Jiu Jitsu warriors will do. A fight to the death, with the fate of humanity at stake. How’s the crazy guy know all this? Remember, “there’s no honor in killing CRAZY!”

The fights are reasonably well-choreographed, the stuntwork not totally obvious. The effects are adequate, there are half-assed “graphic novel” chapter breaks and titles — “The Rabbit,” and the like.

The story? Strictly wakkie nunu.

At least Cage is here for a few laughs. Heck, he’s even given the cleverest martial arts one-liner ever.

“Just remember the one thing you always have with Jiu Jitsu — LEVERAGE.”

MPA Rating: R, violence

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Frank Grillo, Juju Chan, Alain Moussi, Ricky Yune, Tony Jaa

Credits: Directed by Dimitri Logothetis, script by Dimitri Logothetis and Jim McGrath. A Highland Film Group release.

Running time: 1:42

There’s a Post-It note on the light on Dan Fisher’s bedside table.

“Home!”

That’s for when he wakes up in a nightmarish sweat, not knowing where he is. Sydney, Australia is home. But when he isn’t there with his partner Josie, Dan is going to places and seeing things that would give anybody nightmares. He’s what we used to call a “combat photographer,” renamed “conflict photographer” for our changed times, when “war” doesn’t quite describe the traumas sweeping the planet, when photographers like Dan shift their lenses from the combatants to the victims, to the collateral damage of conflicts.

“Hearts and Bones” is a touching, earnest account of a traumatized photographer getting to know immigrants from the conflicts he’s covered, one in particular, and how it changes both men’s lives.

The Great Oz Hugo Weaving is Dan, a high-mileage photographer facing up to a coming perspective of his work back home. He’s having fainting spells and nightmares. Josie (Hayley McElhinney of “The Babadook”) drags him to the doctor. “Any head trauma?”

“Mortars, artillery,” he says. You know, the usual. “Land mines, grenades.”

An opening scene has laid out the risks in Dan’s work. He tries to help an Iraqi child who’s survived a roadside ambush that wiped out her family. A working photographer could get killed in these places. And a professional has to give up a little of her or his humanity in trying to stay sane and alive while there.

“I photograph what my conscience asks me to,” he tells an interviewer. Keeping one’s distance, though, is a part of that bargain.

Sebastian, given a soulful humanity by screen newcomer Andrew Luri, has seen Dan’s photos and heard of the coming exhibit of his work. He’s a Sydney taxi driver and a South Sudanese immigrant. He wants Dan to meet his choir. He’d like Dan to photograph them.

Dan keeps brushing him off. Sebastian says Dan was in his village, photographing a massacre. Sebastian wants to see those photos. His family was murdered that day. He wants to see them, but after that, he wants Dan to put them away.

“They always judge us,” he says, “but they never understand.”

First-time feature director Ben Lawrence has a documentary background, and the lighting, blocking and settings here have a documentary reality about them. There’s nothing arty or brisk in the way he tells this story of the crushing burden of both men’s pasts.

Both have pregnant partners. Both have secrets. Emotions run high, memories are “full of holes.” But as Sebastian imposes himself on Dan’s life, each gives the other cause to revisit pasts that they’re trying to forget.

The film reaches for the heartstrings when Dan meets this “choir,” which turns out to be a conflict refugee support group. The men in the group give their homelands as if they’re reciting Dan’s Greatest Hits — “Ethiopia,” “Zimbabwe,” “Congo, “Syria, or what’s left of it.”

The bigger themes come off better than the scene-by-scene logic and flow of “Hearts and Bones.” Dan’s constantly trying to flee these various relationships, run back to work, avoid those heart-to-hearts never finished, dodge digging through all the trauma in all those career retrospective photos.

Luri and Weaving have an easy, not-quite-intimate rapport. You can see why each character would reach for the other, despite the vast differences in their backgrounds and views of the world. Sebastian is Muslim, for instance, who knows he’ll be judged because “for each of us there is an angel to record our good deeds.”

Dan is a self-described “infidel.”

“Angels are not deterred by your lack of faith,” the Sudanese man tells him.

“Hearts and Bones” isn’t particularly graceful in the way it unfolds, and it doesn’t hide one man’s secret well enough or give the other’s the weight it seems to represent.

But some very fine acting, a few poignant scenes and a general earnestness carry it off.

MPA Rating: unrated, still photographs of violence, sex

Cast: Hugo Weaving, Andrew Luri and Hayley McElhinney and Bolude Watson

Credits: Directed by Ben Lawrence, script by Beatrix Christian, Ben Lawrence. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:50

We don’t allow ourselves to think too deeply of the most heinous crimes, to look too hard at the ghoulish motives of a Jeffrey Dahmer or even an Adolf Hitler.

“Evil,” we say, as if that covers it, as if that’s enough when all that label amounts to is a decision to not consider pathology, the “how a person got to be that way.”

“Evil,” as Dr. Dorothy Lewis once said in shutting down talk show host Bill O’Reilly, “is NOT a scientific concept.”

She should know. She’s made the study of murderers, mass murderers, from Ted Bundy on down the infamy scale, her psychiatric specialty. And what’s she’s discovered, a link between abuse, brain damage or “abnormalities,” could be changing out understanding of the “monsters” among us.

“Crazy, Not Insane” is the distinction at the heart of the prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney’s latest. It’s his third deep dive doc of 2020. And even though it’s narrower in focus than “Totally Under Control,” his film about the screwups in America’s response to COVID 19, or “Agents of Chaos,” about Trump/Russia collusion and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, compared with those works, Gibney’s made a less satisfying film on a more intellectually challenging proposition.

“Murderers are made,” Dr. Lewis maintains, “not born.”

Her decades of work covered sweeping changes in human understanding of the brain and in psychotherapy’s responses to that. Brain scans were brought into the courtroom, by her, to explain the damage this future serial killer suffered when an abusive parent ran over his head, or that abused murderer’s disconnect from reality, thanks to a brain cyst.

“The law has a lot to learn from psychiatry,” Lewis declares. “Instead, psychiatry accepts the law’s definitions” of things like “insanity” and “competence,” as in “competent to stand trial.”

In case after case, many of them in death-penalty-friendly states like Texas and Florida, convicted murderers that in earlier eras we’d have referred to as “barking mad” have been injected or rushed to the chair. Lewis consulted on many of them, most often in service of the defense, and discovered shattered minds and “multiples,” criminals whose multi-personality “dissociative disorder” was so severe that any idea that they knew right from wrong, much less what being executed meant, is laughable.

The killer who saved his dessert from his last meal because he was sure the fellow being executed was another person altogether, and that he’d be around to come back and finish, others whose disconnect from reality was just as vast, keep her awake at nights, Lewis says.

It’s not that she wants them returned to society. “Throw away the key” works its way into several diagnoses. Lewis has struggled to strike a balance between “what we discovered” about a criminal’s pathology “and what the law was willing to accept.”

Much of “Crazy, Not Insane” is Lewis reading from her longhand notes for an upcoming book, or Laura Dern reading her words from previously published work.

We see videotaped prison interview sessions. And Gibney uses animation to flesh out her encounters with “twenty-two serial killers” and “a lot of plain old murderers.”

We hear about the politicization of the death penalty, see her ambushed on the witness stand, unprepared by the tack a defense attorney has taken, hounded for her equivocating way of avoiding absolutes and simple “yes or no” answers.

And a frequent counter to Lewis, Dr. Park Dietz, calls some of her assumptions about the convicted “a hoax,” even as he himself sticks his foot in it as a professional prosecution “insanity defense” debunker.

Maybe he’s jealous because Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro didn’t come to him (they went to Lewis) in order for the actor to get a feel for the tics, expressions and interior life of a psychopath when prepping for “Cape Fear.”

Lewis describes her research as “like being a detective,” although the questioning of the many killers she’s interacted with (Arthur Shawcross, Joseph Paul Franklin) is rarely as convincing as the simple brain scans showing marked abnormalities.

That’s an issue with the film, too. Lewis, working with neurologist Jonathan Pincus, wrote “Guilty by Reason of Insanity,” making the case that politically ambitious prosecutors and the baying mobs at executions are in a rush to kill those we should be studying, if not sympathizing with. That’s a hard sell, as indeed is “Crazy, Not Insane.”

But the director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” has once again taken on a complex evil being done in our name, a subject no one really wants to think about, and forced us to consider the many ramifications of making a flippant and terminal judgment on something that demands attention and understanding, in light of what we now know.

MPA Rating: unrated, violent subject matter, profanity

Cast: Dr. Dorothy Lewis, Dr. Catherine Yeager, (attorney) Richard Burr, Dr. Park Dietz and the voice of Laura Dern

Credits: Directed and scripted by Alex Gibney. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:57

The JFK Assassination Conspiracy Industrial Complex won’t care for “Truth is the Only Client: The Official Investigation of the Murder of John F. Kennedy.”

Then again, will anybody watch a documentary defending the Warren Commission’s findings about the Kennedy Assassination? If there’s one thing the thousands of books, films and TV series and specials have made clear, it’s that the money’s in “conspiracy.” Even a film with the prosecutorial thoroughness of “Truth is the Only Client” will leave those deep down the rabbit hole unconvinced. They’ve been running with “alternate facts” too long to quit now.

I’ve gone back and forth on this subject, like many of us, swayed by this “revelation,” convinced by that recreation. It’s so omnipresent that the Kennedy Assassination has become a cultural punchline, doubt sewn by “Seinfeld” even as we laugh at the conspiracy nut archetype in Richard Linklater’s “Slacker.”

This film is an outgrowth of a touring lecture series run by former Commission counsel Judge Burt W. Griffin and his protege, Judge Brendan Beehan. Their access to surviving members of the legal staff involved in the investigation, to the survivors among those investigated as material witnesses to the murder and to staff of the 1970s House Select Committee on Assassinations allows them to make a convincing case for the Warren Commission’s successes and the slip-ups Chief Justice Earl Warren and others that allowed oxygen into the firestorm of conspiracies that followed the report’s release.

Manson Family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi is also here, as a legal eagle who staged a famous mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in the ’80s, which utterly convinced him that “no credible evidence has surfaced” that contradicts the Warren Commission in the 57 years since JFK’s murder. His assertion, that “the reality” of the mundane nature of the “unstable…lone gunman” assassination simply didn’t fit what people want to believe about this sensational, epoch-altering crime, is the guiding mission statement of “Truth is the Only Client.”

“It’s not Shakespearean.”

Dissecting the Warren Commission’s makeup and history, from the first call to Bill Moyers at the White House (by Yale Law School Dean Eugene Rostow) the weekend of the assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder pitching the need for such a commission, on through those questioned, is fascinating in an of itself. You don’t need the conspiracy-backing slant for to be engrossed in this.

So, from Soviet involvement to mob planning to the “Magic bullet theory,” from The Grassy Knoll to the shooting of Officer Tibbets and mob-connected Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald, the film thoroughly explains the Warren Commission’s findings and its wariness of what it might learn from the FBI and CIA, which had their own agendas in the paranoid days, weeks and months following the assassination.

What I found most interesting was getting at the places where Warren himself screwed up — hiding the Kennedy autopsy photos — the leeriness of anybody wanting help from the notorious Dallas Police Department — and the efforts by the CIA and the FBI to cover their own screw-ups which allowed Oswald’s obsession to bear fruit.

Most Americans still don’t believe the Commission’s conclusions. A convincing TV series like the British-made “The Men who Killed Kennedy” from the ’80s, or Oliver Stone’s red herring-loaded “JFK” can have a lasting impact.

When a film sets out to address much of what conspiracy buffs have used to build their house of cards, it will leave some facts out. Evidence of things “concealed” from the Warren Commission might not help the investigation’s credibility. The House Select Committee, leaning heavily on a scratchy, misinterpreted police motorcycle radio recording of the shooting, didn’t help.

But as “Truth” shows, there was no “magic” bullet, nobody saw anyone shooting from The Grassy Knoll, and I might add, the three shots fired were replicated, from the Book Depository window, for a CBS Special hosted by Dan Rather decades ago (NOT impossible).

The film’s host/narrator, Beehan, may go overboard in his suggestions that “the system worked” in spite of evidence that shows the mistrust in government spawned by the Commission’s thorough, seemingly transparent but apparently not as thorough as they claimed and not transparent enough to not seem a “rush to judgement.”

But that doesn’t mean that “alternate facts” weren’t born in the pages of Mark Lane and other researchers’ truth-bending “investigations,” or that Oliver Stone didn’t do a grave disservice to the culture by celebrating New Orleans prosecutor/crackpot Jim Garrison.

MPA Rating: unrated, Zapruder Film violence

Cast: Vincent Bugliosi, Justice Stephen Breyer, Ruth Paine, Judge Burt W. Griffin, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, G. Robert Blakey, Howard P. Willens, narrated by Judge Brendan Beehan.

Credits: Written and directed by Todd Kwait, Rob Stegman. A Blue Star Media release.

Running time: 2:20

Here’s a laugh we didn’t know we needed right now, a light LEGO lampooning of “Star Wars,” just in time for the holidays.

All those jokes you share with your friends when watching the various trilogies in this over-saturated “universe,” “A New Hope” through “The Mandalorian?” They’re stuffed into “The LEGO ‘Star Wars’ Holiday Special.”

How would Darth Vader react to his first gaze upon the wonder of Baby Yoda?

“Awwww.”

Master Yoda’s comeback, if Luke Skywalker gives him backtalk about the Jedi credo, “Do or do not, there is no try?”

“ParTICipation trophies for Jedi, there are not!”

The Emperor’s patience is always ALWAYS wearing thin.

“Less talky talky, more FIGHTY FIGHTY!”

Jedi Rey (Helen Sadler) can’t seem to get the hang of training Finn. So she takes off for an ancient temple where she and BB8 acquire a key to…”Star Trek’s” “City on the Edge of Forever” time portal. They don’t call it that, but hey, if the portal fits.

She will bounce through the saga, from Yoda’s training of Luke to Qui-Gon Jinn’s training of Obi Wan to Obi Wan’s training of Anakin, taking notes.

Only, because it’s time travel, things get messier by the minute. How many Vaders, Lukes and Darth Maul’s can one 47 minute “special” squeeze in?

She’s got to accomplish all this before a big Life Day holiday party with Chewbacca’s family. Yes, they’ve booked the cantina band. Yes, only one member remains. Don’t ask. And yes, Yoda becomes “The Ghost of Christmas Past” because of course he does.

The overarching theme of the recent trilogy, that individualism is fine, but we’re stronger together, is underlined. And the emperor’s insistence on naming his planet destroyers gets on Vader’s nerves.

“It’s just that ‘Death Star II feels--kind of derivative!”

The animation’s digital LEGO sharp, the effects decent facsimiles of “the real thing” and no, that’s never what matters in Lego send-ups. Some of the voice acting substitutes are as lame as all the “holiday of friendship, of family and of CONNECTION” definitions of Life Day.

It doesn’t really take off until Rey does. Still, for any fan, all these riffs on classic scenes and goofs on the repetitive, formulaic nature of it all, will sting just enough to be funny.

MPA Rating: G.

Cast: The voices of Helen Sadler, Trevor Devall, Matt Sloan, Tom Kane, and Anthony Daniels, Billy Dee Williams and Kelly Marie Tran.

Credits: Directed by Ken Cunningham, script by David Shayne. A Disney+ release.

Running time: :47

A famous writer drags relatives along on a cruise.

Agatha Christie?

In theaters? On TV? No. HBO.

That little dickens Anna Kendrick already did a Christmas movie. But “Happy Christmas” was a bit more naughty than…you know.

So here she is in a genuine Disney Christmas movie for kids, back on Disney+ for the holidays. Did you catch it last year? Do the kids want to see it again?

“Noelle” is sentimental farce that puts Miss “Pitch Perfect” in holiday tights and Christmas sweaters as Santa’s daughter, second banana to older brother Nick (Bill Hader), a woman who has never left the North Pole and who “majored in calligraphy and minored in popcorn stringing.”

But she’s sensitive, always looking out for others. And she “twinkles.” Nick is stressing about taking on the new job, so she suggests he “take a weekend off” have a little get away. Nick doesn’t come back. Even the North Pole puffins are peeved.

Noelle has to “borrow” the sleigh, with trusty nanny elf Polly (Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine) and track Nick down to whatever destination in the travel mag she gave him he might have ventured.

It’s Phoenix, and no, she doesn’t have to circle the globe hunting for him to other cities. That’s the first missed opportunity in a limp comedy that Kendrick has to carry all by herself.

They don’t have her sing, just a little “Tra la la” this and “fa la” that, summoning her animal buddy Snowcone, the (digital) white reindeer calf.

They do let her show off her language skills, which hints at a better comedy that might have been. She’s just as funny in French.

Track down Nick, or tech nerd cousin Gabe (a sadly subdued Billy Eichner) will take over, digitally crack down on the “Naughty or Nice” list and let Amazon Prime replace the sleigh, reindeer, etc.

Nerd.

This childish confection was cooked up by Marc Lawrence, who was once Sandra Bullock’s go-to guy (“Miss Congeniality” scripts, “Two Weeks Notice”), and it’s got a quest and a would-be love interest, the private eye (Kingsley Ben-Adir) Noelle hires to help her locate Nick. Can she afford him? Will he take North Pole gold (covered chocolate) coins?

“Bring non-edible money.”

It has Hader with very little that’s funny to play.

But there’s an elvish quintet who sing little commentaries on the proceedings like a Greek chorus.

“Joy to the world, except for YOU.”

That’s a gimmick worth running with. As with too many other mildly-promising tidbits, Lawrence doesn’t.

But the ladies sell this, with old pros MacLaine and Julie Haggerty (as Mrs. Claus, Noelle’s worrywart Mom) giving it their all.

And Kendrick? After 45 minutes or so of thin entertainment, Anna gets her groove back. Bubbly Noelle has no time for pessimism.

“That’s pretty stocking half-empty.”

She’s got to keep her true identity from the simple happy natives of Phoenix. Where’s she from?

“A little town…up north.”

“Canada?”

“Canada WISHES.”

And arguing with a sibling who’s found “yoga” is apt to bring tears.

“Oh! You! Better not pout, you BETTER not cry!”

In sum, Kendrick’s twinkles. “Noelle” doesn’t. Let her sing and get her a dozen more jokes and this one could have been a holiday keeper.

MPA Rating: G.

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Bill Hader, Shirley MacLaine, Kingsley Ben-Adir and Michael Gross.

Credits: Written and directed by Marc Lawrence. A Disney release on Disney+.

Running time: 1:40

From Exhibitor Relations, your top five for another weak weekend at the cineplex.

“Let Him Go” fell off by just over half, “Freaky” didn’t open at “Unhinged” or “”Let Him Go” levels.

And the pandemic is back, worse than ever. Watch em while you got’em, Film fans.

TOP 5 DOMESTIC BOX OFFICE 1. FREAKY ($3.7M) 2. LET HIM GO ($1.8M) 3. THE WAR WITH GRANDPA ($1.3M) 4. COME PLAY ($1.1M) 5. HONEST THIEF ($800k) So, uh, that freak-flag looks a lot like this… https://t.co/wXViCuHdnY https://twitter.com/ERCboxoffice/status/1328020731381174272?s=20

“Playhouse” is a stylish British ghost story with a great, gloomy Scottish setting, and little else to recommend it.

It’s not frightening, rarely suspenseful and never comes close to the harrowing experience audiences have come to expect from horror movies these days. It’s all squandered opportunities and dull substitutions for our best guesses as to where it will go next.

But the set up is solid gold. A grumpy teen (Grace Courtney) and her Dad (William Holstead) have relocated from London to this seaside Scottish “castle.” It’s one of those homely manor houses that used to be a castle, victim of a drab Dickensian makeover or two over the decades.

But Dad, Jack Travis, has big plans for it. He’s the “horropreneur” of The West End, a successful playwright who has a mind to turn this place into an immersive theatrical experience, “the living play,” he calls it. He’s so deep into the idea that he’s talking to the dead son of the late laird of the manor.

“We’ll show them, won’t we, Alastair?”

Daughter Bee sees all the news-clippings on Dad’s bulletin board, even if she doesn’t overhear him improvising dialogue around the place’s unfortunate history. People have died, an aristocratic family left secrets and perhaps unfortunate members buried in the wall.

Bee, just finishing school, invites classmates over for a spooky evening of drinks, candles and wild tales of the place. They egg each other on until they’ve laid hands upon “the wall,” an exposed part of the older incarnation of the “castle,” where you can still “hear Alastair…the laird’s son” screaming if you touch it.

The girls might not have played this “game” had they known “Bee” is short for “Beleth,” one of the “Kings” (or queens) of Hell.

Can I mention what an utter bust this scene is, dramatically?

Jenny (Helen Mackay) is a curious neighbor who grew up down the lane. She and husband Callum (James Rottger) may be here to tidy up granny’s old place to sell it. But the history of “the castle” tugs at her, and pretty soon they’re having a tetchy dinner with the Travis’s.

What are the secrets this spooky place will draw out of our principals? And what secrets does the castle have for those who dare to dwell there as they hunt for actors and financing for a theatrical theme-park style spooktactular?

Holstead, of “The Burying Party,” has precious little to play here. Jack has to be off his rocker to think he’ll lure people to the middle of nowhere to experience his “living play.” He hints that he expects folks to want to move there just to be a part of this thing. Holstead doesn’t give us much that says “madness.”

Courtney’s “Bee” is all sullen and bangs, and the movie loses track of her for most of the second half. So no help there.

And Mackay and Rottger, playing a couple who aren’t on the same page, with ties to the spooky house that aren’t mysterious or shocking, don’t add much to the proceedings. Something draws Callum to Jack, but there’s no hint of the house putting him under its spell, just as there’s too little of that where Jack is concerned as well.

So what we’re left with is a fumbling, groping and almost wholly-unsatisfying thriller set in a towering old house near the water’s edge, where the wind howls and there’s a shock, fright or laugh behind every tree.

Except that it being Scotland, there’re no bleeding trees.

MPA Rating: unrated, horror imagery, profanity

Cast: William Holstead, Grace Courtney, Helen Mackay, James Rottger

Credits: Written and directed by Fionn Watts and Toby Watts. A Devilworks release.

Running time: 1:26

There’s a moment, after we’ve seen an hour of the stoic Swedish teen Greta Thunberg start a global climate movement, meet with world leaders and agree to every “selfie” asked of her by fans along the way, when we get a taste of just what this activism has cost her.

It’s not in the scary “security” briefing and first aid refresher course her dad, Svante, gets after the death threats start. And it doesn’t come the first time she expresses dismay and even outrage at the “fake” political leaders and all the lip service paid her cause when the cameras are rolling and Celebrity Greta is present.

She’s on board the racing sloop “Malizia II,” bombing across the Atlantic on a carbon-fibre/carbon-neutral sailboat trip to New York. The seas are heaving, but she’s as poker-faced as a Vegas high roller. It’s the tearful aftermath of a call home that reminds us that she’s just 16 when this footage was shot. She’s a teenager with Asperger’s forced to cope with being mobbed, meeting tens of thousands of strangers when what she craves are solitude, “routine,” and the family and the animals she always found easier to relate to.

“I Am Greta” isn’t just about a global phenomenon that’s grown out of one child’s protest. It’s about what a little girl, derided by climate change deniers and right wing pundits as “mentally ill” and “depressed” and “attention-starved,” having the do a staggering laundry list of things she fears the most in life because of one thing she fears worse than any other — mass extinction and an unending climate crisis that leads to it.

Nathan Grossman’s marvelous “fly on the wall” documentary follows Thunberg from that first day, as she took her hand-drawn placard and sat down in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.

“SKOLSTREJK for KLIMATET,” it read. “School Strike for Climate.”

Adults shake their heads as they pass. One older woman stops to gently lecture her that yes, there’s a crisis, but you’d get more accomplished staying in school.

“No one gives a damn,” Greta mutters, in Swedish, with English subtitles.

And then other kids join her. A tiny bit of online video attention follows, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with millions of followers on Twitter, endorses her protest. Just like that, a Swedish protest becomes a European, and then global phenomenon and movement.

What humanizes her is how she soldiers through all this activity that she has an aversion to, accompanied by her skeptical father, polishing her message and sharpening her criticism, which she gets the chance to deliver in the world’s most public places — at conferences, in British parliament (“Is my microphone on?” she wants to know, in English. “Because you don’t seem to be hearing me.”) and at the U.N.

“I want you to panic. I want you to act like the house is on fire.”

Because, frankly, it is.

Grossman’s film makes us appreciate what a smart kid she is and how she somehow shrugs off her symptoms and the way she triggers the climate-denial right. Her Dad should have bought a plane ticket to Australia and punched the wingnut who called his daughter “a virtue signaling little turd” on Murdoch-friendly TV. But you know, flying is off limits in this family. That’s why she traveled to the UN via sailboat, after all.

Being on the autism spectrum may explain her laser-intense focus on this issue, on “drowning polar bears, deforestation and ocean acidification.” She freely admits it lets her “see through the static.”

Her Dad may be proud of her ability to turn herself into an expert on this subject and a global icon through her “almost photographic memory” (a politician fervently shoves a big climate report into her hands as she’s heading into one speech) and well-intentioned obsession. What moves her mother Elena to tears is just the knowledge that Greta is now able to “eat in front of other people,” another phobia related to her condition that she won’t let stop her.

Who knows if she’ll remain this focused on this issue forever? And will she remain an icon when she’s no longer a pony-tailed teen?

But when she promises “We will be a pain in the ass” of officialdom, and “We will not stop,” I wouldn’t bet against her. She’s already one tough, laser-focused broad.

MPA Rating: unrated, a little profanity

Cast: Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emanuel Macron, Pope Francis

Credits: Directed by Nathan Grossman. A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:37