He never saw Ocasio-Cortez coming; few did, other than these filmmakers. Because of Lears’s early access to the candidates, she and her camera seem to have been in the war rooms right from the start. Quickly and efficiently, and with the aid of some concise onscreen text and talking-head interviews, she sketches in how Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats operated. A lot of this is fascinating but could be clearer; it’s hazy how the groups coordinated their efforts in 2018, how they actually run candidates and what running someone fully entails. There are atmospheric back-room scenes with the candidates and their teams, but who hired whom?

The timeline jumps around a bit, not always helpfully. Ocasio-Cortez is already running when the movie opens on her delivering an amusing gender analysis while putting on makeup. Soon, the movie cuts to Kentucky nine months earlier where a group of young people with laptops (one ornamented with a “Bernie for U.S. President” bumper sticker) are discussing an unnamed potential candidate. There’s talk and a call for a vote: “All those in favor of moving her to the next round, raise your hand.” Cut to Corbin Trent, of the Justice Democrats, who says that the “biggest shared goal” of his group and Brand New Congress is “removing the corrupting influence of money in politics.”

These two organizations, Trent continues, are offering an alternative path to Congress, one free of lobbyists and special-interest groups. “Right now our Congress is 81 percent men,” Trent says. “It’s mostly white men, it’s mostly millionaires, it’s mostly lawyers.” This peek at outsider organizations is fascinating and could easily be spun into a separate documentary, as could the story of Jo-Ann Floyd-Whitehead, a community organizer who in 2008, with her husband, helped Barack Obama win the Democratic primary. “The Whiteheads are legendary,” says Ocasio-Cortez as people pore over her petition to get on the 2018 primary ballot. “This is the war room for every insurgent campaign in Queens.”

This particular insurgency, of course, was part of a larger national shift that “Knock Down the House” (and the Bernie Sanders stickers and T-shirts) makes clear was only partly in reaction to the Trump presidency. Lears doesn’t dig into that shift as deeply as she could (this is the rare time that you yearn for a movie to be longer), but it’s there as the candidates push forward and their races and the documentary both develop great urgency. These women are running for office — while driving, walking, talking and walking some more — to win hearts and minds and votes. Often, it feels as if they’re running for their lives. They are also, as Ocasio-Cortez says forcefully, “running to win.”