There’s a moment, about six minutes into The Amazing Johnathan Documentary, where its star, a magician, appears to be choking. I say “appears”, because the reality of the scene remains unresolved. The Amazing Johnathan, suffering from a heart condition and with, we’re told, a year or so to live, attempts to swallow the “bane” of his retirement: a large white pill. He heaves, gurgles – loudly, comically, like a bad actor. Or maybe that’s just what someone dying by pill size sounds like? “Are you joking?” the film’s director, Ben Berman, asks off-camera. No, I’m not, Johnathan sputters, but he’s also smiling.

Is he joking? Do you trust what you can see? Such is the confusion of Hulu’s mind-bending The Amazing Johnathan Documentary, a film that is ultimately more a documentary about figuring out what a documentary should be than a profile of the past-his-prime magician from which it takes its name.

The Trojan-horsing of subject – the film is as much about Berman and his motives as documentarian as Johnathan’s final tour – is a deflection similar to the half-illusion, half darkly comedic stunts The Amazing Johnathan once pulled as a resident performer on the Vegas strip through the ’90s and early 2000s. In other words, “there’s bigger things at play in this movie than either a) originally it seems like there will be or b) than the movie tells you that there are”, Berman explained in a recent interview.

The film opens as a standard profile of a performer in decline – Johnathan surrounded by memorabilia and stewing in his past glory, listening to Amazon Alexa’s rendition of his Wikipedia summary: “Johnathan Szeles, better known by the stage name the Amazing Johnathan, is an American stand-up comedian/magician … the self-described ‘Freddy Kreuger of comedy’, whose hijinks and gleeful gore influenced a generation of Vegas performers.” (Criss Angel, Carrot Top and Penn Jillette all testify to his legacy in the film.) This straight-forward act – a portrait of an artist in sunset, whose prolific meth use (some on camera, save for a small black box over the pipe) far outpace his remaining years – lasts for about a third of the film’s 90 minutes.

And then, like the magic tricks he sets to capture, Berman turns focus, and the documentary that pitches itself as “Magic. Meth. Mayhem” tilts into ethical confusion. Specifically, Johnathan drops a bomb on his relationship with Berman: five months into filming and two days before the crew is set to fly to Boston for a Johnathan comeback show, the magician informs the documentarian, via phone call replayed in the film, that there will be a second, competing documentary crew in tow.

“When Johnathan first told me about the second crew, there’s no question that I felt both really sad and confused,” Berman said to the Guardian. “Because at that point, I thought of Johnathan as my friend, and why would a friend put me at a disadvantage like that?”

The new crew came touted by Johnathan as award-winning, launching Berman, a first-time feature filmmaker, into a creative tailspin that steers the remainder of the movie. “Structurally, at that point in the production, I had a decision to make: should I give up and not compete with these film-makers? Or, do I open up the story to include this part of the narrative?” Berman explained of his choice to bring the competition (and its attendant anxieties) in front of the camera. “And if you’re boiling down what documentary is, I think it’s an exploration of the truth — what’s really going on here? So if a documentary is seeking truth and something is going on in my subject’s life, it would be almost unethical to not include that in the movie.”

The twist proved creatively fruitful, but also opened up a Pandora’s box of doubt and introspection. Was Johnathan’s diagnosis real? (“Everyone thought that the whole dying bit was a prank,” one friend of Johnathan’s says). Is it unethical to confront him? (“Are you disappointed that I’m not dying in your timeframe?” Johnathan asks Berman). Why does Berman want to film a dying magician? (“I feel bad that I’m using him for his death,” Berman, who brings his chorus of work and personal advisors onscreen, tells his father). Who is using who? And how can you see – with this illusionist, in this economy – the line between what’s real and what’s not?

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary Photograph: Hulu

According to Berman, these questions emerged early on, though it took time and the second documentary crew for them to manifest in the film. The first time he met Johnathan, in 2016, the magician appeared gravely ill, leaning on a walker. Berman recalled a beat of clarity – “I was overtaken by the idea that I want to make a movie about a dying man” – followed immediately by confusion, as Johnathan kicked away the walker. “He was like, ah, I’m just fucking with you. He didn’t have to use the walker. He pranked me, basically.”

At the time, Berman saw it less as a red flag than an opportunity to explore a complicated, beguiling character. “I was more trusting then than I should’ve been,” Berman admitted. “Looking back on it now, that’s a clear sign that you can never really trust, or never really know, what’s real and what’s not.”

As Berman embarks on a gonzo trip down the rabbit hole for answers, the film captures his “story chess” with Johnathan – a game for access and trust involving on-screen confrontations, paid actors and, as advertised, more meth.

The result is a documentary in which Berman himself is a star, asking what kind of documentary (and with what ending) he wants to make. The film, and its preoccupation with trust and skepticism, “feels zeitgeist-y for a couple reasons”, Berman said, “one of which is the fucking president can go on television, can go on national news, and say whatever the hell he wants and refute reality by calling it fake news. He’s a fucking magician, and he’s a bad one.” Skirting the truth, Berman said, is easier than ever. The undefined bounds of illusion produce a percolating doubt that you’re being lead, or are leading yourself, astray.

That doubt leads the film on a path of unwinding – overturning the pieces of a classic profile in a style that, according to Berman, mirrors Johnathan’s brand of rogue, shock-jock magic. “He deconstructed magic – he fucked up and deconstructed magic tricks for the sake of comedy and for the sake of destroying something to build something new back up,” Berman said. “And I think the movie does the same thing – it deconstructs itself to comment on itself, and to become a new thing.”