"Why did you let me film this?"

It's a question that isn't posed explicitly until one of the film's final scenes, but it's a defining one. Anthony Weiner stands a few feet from the TV, watching silently as the returns confirm he has been trounced in the 2013 New York mayoral race, when Josh Krieger, who shot and directed the film, asks it of him. The answer is, technically, a simple one: Krieger worked on the former congressman's 2005 mayoral campaign, was his New York chief of staff, and knew him well. When he heard Weiner was trying to restart his political career after his comically infamous sexting scandal, Krieger, by then a filmmaker, immediately asked his old boss if he could document it.

New York Daily News

But that really only answers the question of why it was Krieger as opposed to anyone else. As for the more pressing question—Why would someone trying to extricate himself from one of the great media frenzies of the digital age allow anyone to follow him around at close quarters with a camera and basically no restrictions? that's a tougher one. It gets to the heart of Anthony Weiner, the character. And it gets to the heart of this relentlessly paced, incorrigibly funny, often cringe-inducing documentary that follows the attempted rehabilitation of a disgraced public figure from the most intimate of perspectives.

Weiner begins with a montage tracing the history of the titular politician's public persona. There is his meteoric rise to prominence as a made-for-TV liberal firebrand bubbling over with passion and personality. There is his spectacular fall from grace as one of the last great tabloid scandals erupts over tweets he sent featuring sexually explicit photos. It's a whirlwind glimpse of his life through the dazzling lens of the public eye, a romp through the kaleidoscope of political celebrity. And then, suddenly, we crash back to earth, to a dimly lit living room, comfortable but modest, where Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, play with their young son.

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It's a first glimpse of the extraordinary access granted to Krieger and co-director Elyse Steinberg. Wherever Weiner and his team go, it seems, so goes the camera. It is never more than a few feet away as he sits at his campaign offices raising money, meets with his campaign's inner circle, travels to and fro in a black SUV, and marches in every parade there is—from Gay Pride to Puerto Rican Day. It's there for his most private interactions with Abedin, even when his sexting scandal erupts anew and the two are thrust into the kind of firestorm that surely puts a marriage in jeopardy.

The looks Huma Abedin gives her husband—silent, glowering stares that betray a cold fury underneath—are worth the price of admission.

Abedin herself is a fascinating presence on screen. She was often cast as the victimized Good Wife throughout the initial scandal, but that was never the full story. She is, after all, a world-class political operative, a major player in the Clinton machine who, even in 2013, had her eyes on a prominent position in a future Hillary Clinton White House. There are glimpses of her skill and stature in the film: when she gets on the phone to "close the deal" with big-money campaign donors, or when, as the second scandal erupts, she tells her husband's communications director to "look happy" in front of the waiting cameras as the staffer leaves a crisis meeting.

Weiner says early on that the two decided together that a successful campaign would be "the most direct way back" to the life they'd had, implying it was her idea as much as his. And when it all begins to implode, she recedes from the fold, taking more and more calls—and advice—from Clinton adviser Phillippe Auclaire. She knows which way the wind blows, and she's not about to be caught up in it. She's a quietly calculating enigma, but her steely facade does break occasionally. The looks she gives her husband—silent, glowering stares that betray a cold fury underneath—are worth the price of admission. And standing in her kitchen at the height of the redux scandal, she turns towards the camera slightly and says it all: "It's like living a nightmare."

Rabbani and Solimene Photography Getty Images

It's a nightmare wholly created by her husband, but his relationship to that truth is complicated. At various points, he rants to the camera about the media's obsession with shiny objects and its refusal to let him campaign on the issues. That's echoed by some of the essential New York characters he and the camera run into on city streets and at campaign events. People he meets at parades and marches implore him to keep going and ignore his detractors. When, towards the beginning of the campaign, a press gaggle asks again and again about the initial scandal, an onlooker can't help but scold them: "We don't care about his personal garbage," she shouts, "We're from the Bronx."

Weiner himself is not unaware of his culpability, though. The media is obsessed with what he did, he says at one point—but then, addressing the camera, he admits it unequivocally: "I did that thing." At times he seems eager to reflect, in front of anyone who'll listen, on his own shortcomings and neurotic complexities. He is almost magnetically attracted to cameras and microphones—an addict, by his own admission, with attention for a vice. But it's attention from a peculiar kind of disembodied source: the viewer he'll never meet, and, eventually, the sexting partners he'll never see or touch. It's stimulation without intimacy, an encounter without a connection. It's polished and glittering and empty. And it raises the question—one amplified in the Age of Trump—about whether a certain brand of emotionally stunted narcissism is the hallmark of at least one species of political animal.

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The film sweeps away the pretense and the illusion that dominates a modern political campaign's outermost layers. While cable news might show the duck floating along placidly, Weiner is proof enough the feet are paddling desperately beneath the surface. There are times, like his meltdown on Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC program, where the turmoil that besets the campaign—and the candidate personally—is there for all to see. (Weiner's way of processing it—playing the clip over and over, cackling—tells its own story.) But often, the true state of things is obscured from view. The film takes you to the City Island community board meeting at the height of the second controversy, where he pulls a crowd of dozens adamantly against him into his corner with one long, impassioned rhetorical flourish. And it takes you to the midtown McDonalds he darts into to escape his most infamous digital partner, Sydney Leathers, who has come to disrupt his concession speech next door.

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It's hard to forget the sight of a 23-year-old, the tattoo of a many-limbed tree sprawling across her back, sprinting after a mayoral candidate through a fast food restaurant. It's harder, still, to ever see the bright-and-shiny TV appearances of any candidate the same way again. Krieger and Steinberg's film is a peerless examination of politics in the digital age, capitalizing on extraordinary access to pull back the curtain on a rapidly disintegrating public-figure paradigm. It's fast, it's funny, and it's the timeliest of reminders that those trying to lead us can be bruised, confused, and desperate for validation.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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