Moby Dock

If nothing else, “Moby Doc” is the perfect title for Rob Gordon Bralver’s documentary about the electronic musician Moby. Not because its subject, born Richard Melville Hall, is the great-great-great-grandnephew of a certain novelist — somehow that never comes up — but rather because the pun’s tongue-in-cheek aftertaste of self-importance so accurately prepares your palate for an insufferable movie that wants to be profound and benign in equal measure.

That title says “Just because this guy commissioned and co-wrote a film about himself on the heels of publishing two different memoirs doesn’t mean that he takes himself too seriously.” It sets just the right tone for a perversely navel-gazing portrait of one artist’s long journey toward accepting their own insignificance; a documentary by and about a famous person who insists that he only deserves to be the subject of a documentary because — for all of his unlikely success and close personal friendship with David Bowie — he’s reached the divine understanding that he doesn’t really deserve to be the subject of a documentary. Maybe such meta-irony is on-brand for an outspoken animal rights activist who borrowed his stage name from the story of a mad-eyed hunter, but that layered mesh of defense mechanisms obscures the white whale that Moby appears to have been chasing since the natural outcast first picked up a guitar: An abiding sense of self-worth.