Did Orson Welles invent the mockumentary? Not as the record currently stands. But were the long arc of Hollywood history in any way bent toward justice, he might at least be credited as one of the genre’s earliest, most radical pioneers. The Other Side of the Wind, his recently completed and released final film, which is now available to stream on Netflix, is the proof.

The movie—which was filmed intermittently between 1970 and 1976, and sat unfinished when Welles died in 1985—is a brash, jazzy, tragic account of a legendary director’s 70th birthday party, an event that also happens to be the last night of the man’s life. The director, Jake Hannaford (played by the real Hollywood maverick John Huston), is in the middle of trying to finish a plotless, impassioned new feature, titled The Other Side of the Wind, that’s got investors in a panic and critics circling overhead like vultures. The movie’s fresh-faced star, a chiseled blond named John Dale (Robert Random), has abandoned the movie—or, rather, Hannaford’s aggressive emasculation on set has more or less pushed him out of it. Meanwhile, there’s been talk that Hannaford has declined in artistic relevance.

The birthday party becomes something of a reckoning, with Hannaford’s cliffside Los Angeles house aswarm with critics, biographers, fellow directors (the likes of Paul Mazursky, Claude Chabrol, and Dennis Hopper, all playing themselves), and acolytes, among them Brooks Otterlake (played by a young Peter Bogdanovich), whose ties to Hannaford are complicated by his success. Otterlake’s movies bear the mark of Hannaford’s influence—but he also just struck a $40 million deal that catapults him out of his struggling mentor’s league.

You don’t need to be a Welles scholar to see traces of the director’s own Hollywood story in The Other Side of the Wind, and his own difficulties with financiers, critics, and friends in this final masterwork—which, not unlike Hannaford’s own last movie, was marred by well-documented fights with studios and financiers. And you don’t need to be a Welles-ologist to note the eerie parallels between Otterlake and Hannaford’s relationship and Welles’s own eventually frayed ties to Bogdanovich in real life.

Or to notice that one of the journalists at the party, Julie Rich (Susan Strasberg), bears more than a passing resemblance (if a comically cruel one) to the great New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, who in an infamous two-part article for The New Yorker in 1971, disputed the authorship of Welles’s canonical feature-film debut, Citizen Kane, and questioned his artistic contributions to the project. Here, Julie Rich flits and flutters around the party with what at first resembles a parodic cluelessness, aping this psychoanalytic theory and that, while displaying little insight into the business itself. She even floats questions about Hannaford’s sexuality—and by the end, the film slyly seems to concede her point.

The Other Side of the Wind is a strange film in that way: a movie clearly made by a man who’d withstood years of Hollywood exile, but whose heart was in some ways still lodged there, ready to be flayed open by an exhausting six-year shoot with his friends, frenemies, and closest collaborators—including the Croatian actress Oja Kodar, who co-wrote the film and stars as the nude, cutting, nameless star of Hannaford’s project, just as she served as something of a muse for Welles.

You don’t need this context to appreciate the anarchic majesty of what’s here, nor to imagine what a great tragedy it was, over the years, to think Welles’s film—nearly 100 hours of footage—was languishing somewhere, impossible to complete. You don’t need the backstory to know that Welles’s movie-within-a-movie—Hannaford’s project—is a complete riot every time it intrudes on Hannaford’s party with a distorted sexual energy. It’s Welles doing Michelangelo Antonioni: all hard-edged architectural modernism, sharp visual planes, and desirous ennui. Little really “happens” in the film: a woman (played by Kodar), is pursued by a handsome man (John Dale, played by Random) across an array of landscapes, to say nothing of a bathroom orgy, a hookup on a car in a rainstorm, a metaphorical re-enactment of castration. Have I mentioned Hannaford’s movie is steeped in sex, though Welles’s movies, with rare exception, are not?