One of the more dizzying aspects of internet life is the the surreal experience of digital adjacency – present but not in person, you help narrativize an event, in real time, through engagement. You see Kanye West’s breakdown devolve tweet by refreshed tweet, or live Coachella through your cousin’s boyfriend’s Instagram stories. And in April 2017, many on social media reveled in the collapse of Fyre festival, a supermodel-touted luxury music festival that spectacularly imploded into memes of drunk, concert-less millennials stranded in the Bahamas.

The saga of Fyre festival – examined in Netflix’s documentary Fyre – is, on one level, a classic tale of hubris in 2017 internet speak: a charismatic man, Billy McFarland, recruits the world’s most-liked models to convince people to drop thousands for a fantasy in the Bahamas. Ambitious promotion far outpaces production. Entitled young people who paid thousands to see Blink-182 with sushi live-stream their disappointment. A photo of cheese on bread in a styrofoam container, instead of the promised high-class meal, goes viral. Schadenfreude, memes, cable news. McFarland is sentenced to six years in prison for fraud. It’s all very funny, because it’s not us.

That would be an easy story to tell. But Fyre, directed by Chris Smith of American Movie and Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond, smartly digs into why so many bought into, as one journalist said, “this very slick production”, and who, ultimately, paid for it.

“Slick” would be the word for Fyre, which fuses crisply lit cutaway interviews with clips from its promotional video starring Hailey Baldwin, Emily Ratajkowski and other Instagram-dominant models. But the film’s ace is how it contrasts the “official” high-resolution material with salvaged social media content and genuinely startling behind-the-scenes footage. It’s one thing to know that social media is a game, a performance. It’s another to watch a marketing manager fret over getting enough supermodels posted and tagged by 5pm. One of Fyre’s best revelations isn’t the scale of McFarland’s fraud – a federal court ordered him to pay back $26m – but the Fyre executive team’s impunity caught on camera.

And then there’s the footage of the festival itself, a distinctly 2017 horror show almost too ripe for parody: wealthy and young music enthusiasts, chasing tequila shots and the best light, reduced to looting mattresses while carrying a selfie stick.

A tweet depicting the ‘catered’ meal at Fyre festival went viral in April 2017. Photograph: Netflix

It’s a testament to the film’s grasp on its subject that watching it feels like scrolling through Instagram or Twitter – an internet outrage cycle in containment. First you get the hook (hot models), then the snippets that draw out snark, glee, derision and some genuine anger over the gulf between manufactured expectation and reality (always a thing, but in the case of Fyre, so stark as to be stratospheric). Emotions, in short, that burn up and off easily, like wildfire. The film pulls at these reflexes as if it’s a newsfeed, adopting the template of Instagram tiles and toggling between images of vastly different production quality and truth value. A conventional interview, for example, cuts to a Snapchat Story of maybe-paid influencers processing their repurposed Fema tent “luxury bungalows”.

Later, of course, the sobering truth of who and what were overlooked in the hot takes emerges – that the lack of water and profuse alcohol could have actually killed someone. That the many, many Bahamians – whose island Fyre festival rudely commandeered, and who worked furiously to help McFarland meet the deadline only to get screwed over – were forgotten. The most affecting footage of Fyre belongs to Maryann Rolle, a Bahamian restaurateur who fed bewildered attendees to the tune of thousands of dollars, and for whom Fyre remains not a joke, but a “painful” experience.

Fyre festival attendees arrive to discover that the promised luxury ‘bungalows’ are actually repurposed Fema tents soaked by rain. Photograph: Netflix

Fyre offers plenty of room for blame. So it’s curious that for all the strands of culpability it weaves – the supermodels who promoted the festival, the organizers who repeatedly ignored basic infrastructure concerns, the culture of celebrity and performative wealth that made Fyre tickets so attractive in the first place – the film gives the last word to a series of meditations on McFarland’s charisma and possible redemption.

The documentary doesn’t not consider McFarland’s associates (though co-founder Ja Rule notably escapes much attention), but the final frames muddle the message. For a documentary that so purposefully diffuses blame between both Fyre’s organizers and audience, the parting focus on one person – as if he is the main subject to interrogate – feels off-key.

But it’s a weak note in an otherwise comprehensive look at what, exactly, happened with Fyre festival. Fyre allows you to marvel, and to feel – how spectacular the hubris, how gross the unfairness – while reminding that whether you bought a ticket or not, you were the audience the whole time.