This documentary, for all of its considerable discrete moments and insights, is most fascinating because of its vivid demonstration of how the future is never really as we expect it to be.

The redoubtable Canadian actor Clare Coulter reads the narration of the film by the director, Brett Story , which draws on texts from Zadie Smith , Annie Dillard and Karl Marx . Story, also Canadian, is in New York City in the summer of 2017, which is predicted to have the extreme August of the movie’s title — coming after the summer of 2016.

Story’s camera wanders to neighborhoods and corners that are, by movie standards, obscure. Not that they are threatening. In a white aluminum-sided house, an older gentleman hangs out a window and talks to the camera about the faded glories of having been in the Teamsters. In a marsh in Brooklyn, a member of the American Littoral Society tells a tale of settling 28 nesting pairs of osprey where once there were none. In a bar, an even older gentleman spins his own wheels complaining about how “Everybody wants a job but nobody wants to work.”