Viewed through the fog of high school chess club and the girls who coldly rebuffed my Spanish Bishop, it is easy to forget just how popular chess once was. Not just as a game played by awkward adolescents, but as a mainstream event on par with the Superbowl or the World Cup finals. Bars and shop windows were given over to excited spectators huddled round TVs to watch the games unfold. In an era more commonly defined by scandal and tragedy, news bulletins were known to lead not with Watergate or Munich, but the latest exchanges between Petrosian and Karpov; how unthinkable that would seem just a few years later.

As it was, in 1972 everybody knew about Bobby Fischer. Against a backdrop of escalating tensions, that summer’s championship against Boris Spassky was hyped as nothing less than David versus the Soviet Goliath; a thinking man’s Rocky and Ivan Drago, in a pairing that encapsulated the hopes of warring nations. The authoritarian grip of the Russia Federation was widely reported in the west, their players intensively trained from a young age to exemplify the intellectual prowess of the Communist state. In comparison, America seemed to adopt a more laissez faire attitude – their hopes laid not with farmed prodigies, but on a reclusive eccentric named Bobby Fischer, whose outlandish demands befitted a wildly unpredictable style of play.

Fischer’s childhood was an infamously unhappy one. His mother Regina, a determined activist profiled by the CIA, was lost in the face of her son’s apparent autism, often leaving him to spend hours at a time alone with a chess board. Whilst other children his age enjoyed sleepovers and games in the park, Fischer’s intellect and lifestyle were conspiring to place him against the brightest and the best. He beat them all. “Sure, he had an exceptional mind” reflects a talking head, “but genius isn’t only about an innate gift, but a desire and willingness to sacrifice.”

A childhood beset by loneliness underpins the rise and fall of the last great chess player, and ‘Against the World’ shares extraordinary footage of a country transfixed by a chequered spectacle. In the build up to those games with Spassky, Fischer proves an elusive figure. Arriving in Iceland just days before play was due to begin, he was in no mood to engage with the media circus that awaited him, foiling the jostling reporters by taking refuge in a friend’s house. Upon being told that his host’s father was dying, the detached wonder was characteristically nonplussed. “Oh, I don’t mind”, Bobby shrugged, before returning to his practice.

When they did finally get under way, the matches were largely relayed by impartial observers, Fischer having furiously demanded that the cameras be removed so he could concentrate. Looking back, so much of the series speaks to the paranoia of the time: crushed by an early defeat, Spassky became convinced that the CIA had employed radiating devices to influence his play. An examination of the playing area returned only the ominous spectre of two dead flies.

Liz Garbus directs with confidence, and palpable excitement is wrung from footage that remains stubbornly removed from the action. Yet her truly decisive move comes in a second half that attempts to piece together the strange events that followed: how Fischer disappeared almost overnight, only to emerge decades later as a conspiratorial provocateur on the run from the US government. Garbus unearths a recording, made a day after the attacks of 9/11, in which Fischer – whose family was Jewish – phones in to a local radio station to rant about a Zionist conspiracy. At a press conference afterwards, he becomes embroiled in an ugly scene with a reporter, whose father he once counted as a friend, now dismissed as “a typical Jewish snake” who publically disavowed him. For a moment, there is silence. “Honestly” the reporter sighs, as if seeing his boyhood hero suddenly befallen, “I don’t think you’ve done much here to disprove anything he said”.

Quite how a man of Fischer’s superior intellect found himself washed ashore aboard such abhorrent ideas will never be known, but it makes for fascinating viewing. If by the end it remains difficult to forgive his transgressions, ‘Bobby Fischer Against The World’ makes a compelling case for remembering him as one of defining greats, as much of a machine as IBM’s Deep Blue. Adopting a style that was both efficient and ruthless, he became a Grandmaster at just 15, later reigning as the world number one for five years. In the history of chess, just 10 players have achieved a so-called ‘perfect score’ in championship play. In 1971, Fischer did it twice in succession and never looked back.

He died, aged 64, with a photo of his mother and sister at his side. Human, after all.

In the spring of 2000, Mark Hogancamp left his home in Kingston, NY and returned 2 months later as General Patton’s drinking buddy. Beaten so savagely one night at a bar that doctors feared he may never recover, he emerged from hospital a man without memories. Hogancamp was brain-damaged and – with his Medicare treatment cut off – left to find his place in a strange and frightening world. In time, he would find that place in Marwencol, Belgium.

Some people hide in their work, and others in their vices. For Mark, there is a model town. In his backyard he has built a world within a world, an Airfix retreat into a make-believe town he calls Marwencol. Populating the plywood community with avatars of the few people he can still remember, Mark begins a journey of child-like discovery. “The only man in town, with 27 Barbies” he beams, fixing the jacket of his miniature hero. It looks a little like Nicholas Cage, and he saves the women of the town from a marauding SS patrol, basking later in the adulating crowd of plastic fantastics.

“The Ruined Stocking Catfight club” he explains, “is the only one in Belgium”. Tiny glasses are carefully aligned as the smoky tavern fills with the town’s porcelain residents, the leggy blondes flirting with soldiers on shore-leave while Patton props up the bar. A small sign on the wall set out the rules; “None of the contestants are injured!” it reassures us. Everything here feels wholesome, and if the thousands of auteur pictures Mark has taken of Marwencol are art, then it’s art of the purest kind. There is no agenda to his work, no subversion. The editor of a local magazine observes that similar cult offerings have “a kind of wink-wink about how clever I am”, but that this is different. There’s no irony here, he reflects. “It’s a very authentic feeling, and you don’t see that very often.”

Hogancamp gives life to a world of his own creation in which he sits at once as hero, villain, lover and fighter. On the rare occasion he leaves his yard, he walks with caution along Kingston’s winding roads, dragging along a small plastic vehicle on a string. He looks down at the soldiers in the Jeep and knows they’ll protect him. They, like so much of his hobby, are mirrors of something more. Dressed in uniforms and placed in curious settings, they nonetheless bare the hallmarks of that fateful night at the bar. Mark looks wistfully at an early photo in which sworn enemies come together to toast their fated existence. “The British, the Germans: they all drank together, they all smoked cigarettes together. Everyone got along, no one was against anyone else. It didn’t matter what clothing they wore.”

This is Mark’s therapy. He laments having no one to talk to, mindful of his disappearance into an elaborate fantasy: bustling streets and bucolic expanses, good-time girls standing shoulder-to-should with war criminals and a crimson witch of the west. He tells a story of how his plastic incarnation came to be gagged and bound by the SS, who coldly slashed his ceramic face to mirror the scars on his real one. Like a skeevy exploitation, the women of the town arrive just in time to lay waste to his Nazis captors and save the day. Sighing, he picks up Anna, a Matel favourite. “Her saving me proved that she loves me; that she feels the same about me as I do about her”. On March 26th they marry before a congregation of GI Joes. His real wedding video rings out as the happy couple pose in front of quartered prisoners of war.

His insular life comes to a crossroads when a neighbour makes the time to stop and talk to this middle-aged Walter Mitty, never without a bundle of toy soldiers. Fascinated, he offers to curate a show in New York, and envisages canvas reproductions of Mark’s photos, each a depiction of a surreal, staged moment from the history of Marwencol. For Mark, the offer comes with a profound sense of loss and detachment. Scuffing his shoes on the pavement, he panics about what to wear, or whether he’ll fit in. Moreover, he fears what will become of exposing a world that has protected and nurtured him for so long. “I built Marwencol for my therapy. Now everyone wants to be part of it.”

The question of whether to promote his work is neither the films focal point nor an irrelevance. True, it represents the promise of tangible human connection, the only kind that can truly give back. But the film is less about what’s to come than what it took to get there. Mark is an extraordinary soul, and Marwencol is the touching and poetic journey of how a man might happen to rebuild his life. It’s Lars and the Real Girl writ small in 1:6 miniatures, a documentary wholly unlike anything you’ve seen before. This is a melancholy ode to the most damaging of afflictions: insufferable, unending loneliness. It’s a film that belongs to anyone who ever wanted for more. It’s a tribute to the given-ups, the ignored and the maligned. Most of all, it’s a dedication to the life and times of Mark Hogancamp, beatnik dreamer and survivor, and everything they couldn’t take away.