Nick Broomfield.

Perhaps because their European origins give them outsider status, Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield are the most incisive, intriguing filmmakers producing documentaries about American life today. They couldn’t be more different. Herzog, in Grizzly Man and Into the Abyss, is the brooding Teuton, obsessed with violence, meaning, self-deception, and obsession itself, utilizing state-of-the-art digital cinema equipment. Broomfield, on the other hand, is the wide-eyed British doofus, dragging along a boom mike and a tiny crew as he profiles and chronicles the same qualities of American life as Herzog. Often he looks like he’s slept in his clothes, asking obvious questions and getting seemingly obvious answers.

But there’s more to Broomfield’s documentaries than this; his films often end on the same dark, brooding notes as Herzog’s. His technique permits his subjects (among them Florida serial killer Aileen Wuornos in two films — Aileen Wuoronos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer — and “Hollywood madam” Heidi Fleiss) to reveal far more of themselves than they think, unveiling contradiction and conflict. The same is true of the themes of his films, which emerge only after long engagements with his interview subjects. His 2002 Biggie and Tupac is one of the most insightful documentaries about race, poverty, and the American justice system of the past 15 years, and its insights are only slowly discovered: the contrast of the urban ghettos of Brooklyn and the suburban ghettos of Los Angeles; the culture of celebrity and the means by which it exploits racial hatreds and divisions; the entertainment industry. Through all of these landscapes Broomfield shambles along, his outsider status inviting his subjects to be perhaps more open with him than with an American documentarian.

Broomfield started his career as a Frederick Wiseman acolyte, but as he continued to experience difficulties in making these films he decided to integrate these difficulties into the structure of the films themselves. And so his style was born: an ordinary individual, seeking the truth about things he’s read about in the newspapers, doggedly dragging around cameras and tape recorders in an attempt to document the truth itself — a truth which remains elusive, for those who may possess it are not ready to give it up, whether they’re lying to themselves or lying to Broomfield or, in most cases, want money for it.

The explicitly subjective documentary techniques of both Herzog and Broomfield open them to the charge of self-serving solipsism, a charge occasionally justified. Broomfield’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha! especially suffers from this, but mainly because Broomfield chose such an easy satirical target. But this is a rare failing; more often than not, the insights into American culture that Broomfield’s films reveal say far more about the stresses of the culture than about Broomfield.

The questions of subjectivity and personal perspective have been a part of the aesthetics documentary film ever since the Lumiere brothers in the 1890s made a conscious decision as to where to place their camera as an oncoming train approached. Broomfield, like Wiseman and Herzog, is a political filmmaker, especially as his recent “fiction” film Battle for Haditha, set in wartime Iraq, attests. But the politics emerge organically from the subjects of his films rather than as an explicit ideology; more contemplation than confrontation.

It is a shame that Broomfield wasn’t around to document l’affaire Daisey, especially since he directed the film version of Spalding Gray’s monologue Monster in a Box and, more controversially, a documentary about the making of one of Lily Tomlin’s one-person shows. Both Broomfield and Daisey have been held to account for manipulating time and explicit fact in their non-fiction work; Broomfield, as revealed in Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, had to do so in a courtroom; Daisey, who may be charged with a tendency to self-importance, has achieved a certain status as a celebrity, which has colored the reception of his monologues. And Daisey is very much an American artist through and through in the tradition of Twain, Tomlin, and Gray.

Many of Broomfield’s documentaries are available via Netflix streaming, and Jason Wood’s book Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons is a very good profile of the filmmaker, covering Broomfield’s career through 2005. For an example of Broomfield in the hot seat himself, this BBC interview from 2008 has him defending his aesthetics and style in the Wuoronos documentaries; it makes for fascinating viewing.

In the 1990s and 2000s, a hustler in the northeastern United States exploited his ethnic roots and his winning style to bilk hundreds of people from his ethnic community out of millions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. Ultimately the scheme collapsed around him and he was finally arrested, tried, and convicted. Some would see in this a moral tale, certainly one to warm the heart of Jonathan Swift.

A recent documentary, currently streaming on Netflix, presents this moral tale. The Man Who Would Be Polka King, a 2009 film by Joshua Brown and John Mikulak, tells the story of Polish emigrant Jan Lewan (nee Lewandowski), an entertainer who came to the United States and eventually wound up in the economically depressed small city of Hazleton, PA. Filled with self-confidence, he determined to make himself an international polka star; Hazleton, with its substantial Polish community, seemed the best place to begin. He started his own orchestra and, relying on his own charisma and energy, established himself as a major entertainment figure there, organizing overseas trips for his fans and opening a gift shop. Lewan hoped to fuel his dreams of success by selling promissory notes in his business and career at an astonishing 12% (later 20%) interest rate to his Hazleton fans, who invested substantial quantities and sometimes all of their life savings in his scheme. In the end, like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme (also a form of affinity fraud), it was doomed to collapse, and it does so — pathetically and violently.

The Man Who Would Be Polka King is a small gem of a documentary, telling the story through interviews with Lewan himself, his family, his friends, his victims, and federal prosecutors. The narcissistic Lewan also employed a videographer, so the film features a great deal of footage of both his performances and his overseas travels. The narration is provided by a fictional polka enthusiast, Stan Tadrowski (played by comedian Greg Korin with a three-day growth of beard and a wonderful northeast PA accent), who tells the story from a barstool in a Hazleton American Legion post. And the story is filled with anecdotes — most amusingly, one in which Lewan purchases a private audience with Pope John Paul II, dragging a suitcase-full of money to the Vatican.

Lewan’s ultimately sad career — which includes the death of two band members and the critical injury of his own son during an ill-fated Florida bus tour, and his own near-death at the hands of a fellow prisoner during his jail term — is an American Dream story writ small, where success meets failure and narcissistic celebrity attracts unthinking followers. Mark Twain would admire the craft with which Brown and Mikulak suggest that the victims’ gullibility was only matched and magnified by their greed; and the filmmakers’ sympathy extends to Lewan and his family as well, victims of their own narcissism though capable of recognizing their own failings, undercutting the occasional snarkiness of the film.

I grew up in Hazleton during the 1970s, and a few members of my family participated in the polka circuit — this was long before Lewan’s story begins, but I recognized the people and the atmosphere, which haven’t changed much. In those days I dreamed of New York, subscribing to the Village Voice and making occasional visits to the city, which seemed distant in both mind and place. As the story of Hazleton’s Bernie Madoff suggests, perhaps there is not much distance between a depressed coal-mining town and a cosmopolis like New York after all; and perhaps the differences between the people who live in both are fewer than we’d like to think.

The Man Who Would Be Polka King is available free online here; below is the trailer for the film. It’s worth your 67 minutes.