So it is altogether possible that Exit is a cinematic forgery. Whether it is a documentary or a punkumentary, who can say? Not even its distributor knows for sure.
Yet as it follows the stealth artmaking of taggers who by night surreptitiously stencil, paint, or otherwise affix images to walls and lampposts, it establishes a noirish mood and thriller uncertainty that keeps the viewer engaged. And off-balance.
Who are these artists from London and Los Angeles using the city as their canvas? How do they elude the authorities? How do they support themselves? As the film suggests: because they can, because they must, and by selling "props" or other residue of their urban theater.
In the cinematic adrenaline rush, narrated puckishly by Rhys Ifans, Banksy appears on camera, his face obscured by a hoodie and his voice digitally doctored. He's not exactly a masked man.
But like the Lone Ranger or Big Brother, the British-born artist derives his power from his anonymity. As he tells it, he wanted a documentarian to make a movie about street art, but instead the street artist ended up making a movie about the documentarian.
That would be Thierry Guetta, also known as Mr. Brainwash, a French expat and thrift shop mogul in Los Angeles. Guetta, who makes his money by selling odd lots of clothes and calling them "vintage," is a hippie throwback "with facial hair from the 1860s" - as Banksy nicely describes his muttonchops. The Frenchman is addicted to two things: videotaping and thrill-seeking. The two habits converge when he documents the work of his cousin, Paris street mosaicist Invader.
One guerrilla leads to another. Which is how Guetta comes to hook up with Banksy and Shepard Fairey (a stenciler not yet famous, as of the film, for his Obama image "Hope").
