The film producer Marie Therese Guirgis first met Steve Bannon 15 years ago, when he became her boss at an independent film distribution company in New York. Guirgis found Bannon to be alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) charismatic, demanding, intelligent, and foul-tempered, and, though the company was shuttered a few years later, the two stayed in touch. When Bannon joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, Guirgis wrote him an impassioned email expressing what she calls “shock, anger, and disgust.”

When Bannon—soon to become Trump’s campaign chairman and, after the election, the White House chief strategist—actually replied to Guirgis’s email, it set in motion a new round of communiqués that ultimately resulted in The Brink, Guirgis’s and director Alison Klayman’s picaresque, fly-on-the-wall documentary that silently shadows the far-right Johnny Appleseed around the world as he attempts to assemble a kind of supergroup of hard-right political parties out of a ragtag group of nationalist leaders—think the Hollywood Vampires but instead of aging rockers they’re revanchist, hate-stoking neofascists.

Klayman began filming in the fall of 2017, just before Bannon, in the wake of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, was rechristened by Trump as “Sloppy Steve” who had been unceremoniously “dumped like a dog,” to quote Trump, from both the White House and his post as executive chairman of Breitbart News, the online dumpster bin of fringe-right conspiracy theories he’d led since 2012. (Among Bannon’s sins: throwing around words like “treasonous” to describe Donald Trump, Jr.’s secret meeting with a Russian lawyer.) Licking his wounds, we see Bannon in his Washington, D.C., bachelor pad/world headquarters (a.k.a. the former so-called Breitbart Embassy), pounding Red Bull and watching his manservant—sorry, that’s his nephew Sean, billed here as Bannon’s “assistant”—cook him his eggs for breakfast; we listen to him talk about wanting to lose 35 pounds so that people don’t call him “that gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk.” For the record, Bannon says that, despite doing “the Lord’s work” in the White House, he “hated every minute of it”—there’s “no glamour to the place at all.”

Which genus of Bannon emerges from this septic tank of self-reinvention? As any astute observer of opportunistic, atavistic, bottom-feeding, swamp-dwelling creatures already knows, this particular pulmonate reinvented himself as the pied piper of populism—a kind of global leader manqué for the crowd that reviles “globalists” (or simply uses the term with a wink and a nod—and as a stand-in for Jews—while denying it with their fingers crossed behind their backs).