Lean into the camera and begin. “I took a year off to raise guinea pigs with my girlfriend.” He pauses. “And to do cocaine”.

Total Badass is a journey into sight and sound with Chad Holt, one-time student body president who aced his classes only to find himself, years later, reunited with a dropout friend to wash the grease from restaurant kitchens. The romanticised air of the last drunk poet follows him around, as happy to wax lyrical about Descartes as he is to grin manically while changing into his sloppy work overalls. “This movie could just be about how crazy and badass I am” he concludes, meditating on the reasons for making the film. “But I’m at a point right now where I need to get my shit together, and I think the movie could be about that.”

You want to believe in his cause, but Chad is, if nothing else, a man who promises much and delivers only a fatalistic pilgrimage to youth. A string of dead-end jobs are supplemented by gigs in a band of sorts, an anarchic rabble whose ambitions stretch no further than a full belly and fists in the air. Watching as their drunk hero throws himself off the stage to a choreographed landing on a pair of trash cans, I was curious if the crowd saw as I did: a drunk uncle playing Henry Rollins dress-up, fronting for Black Flag outside the 7-Eleven after work.

His writing in a self-published magazine is celebrated by a small community who laud him as their own Hunter S. Thompson. A few naysayers raise concerns at his tone, which is one of a man revelling in antagonism, pushing imaginary boundaries of taste and decency in the hope it will disguise his fate as another junkie burnout who didn’t make it. At one point he stops on the street to give food to a panhandler ( “This is a little religious thing I have to do”), and it’s a strange display of lapsed-Christian spirit that I struggled to reconcile not just with his racist and openly sexist work, but his later celebrating a dodged drug test by getting high in the car park outside.

Drugs are a large part of Chads life, recreationally and as a source of money, and it makes for depressing viewing. Director Bob Ray, until now an impartial voice behind the camera, eventually gives Chad a camera of his own to film with, and so begins a slow-motion car crash of coke binges, sex with strangers, and an unexplained, seemingly pedestrian bout of self-harm. At one party, he’s so far gone that mere incoherence would reflect a welcome sobriety. “You’re letting me down” his on-off girlfriend sighs, affectionately playing with his hair as his eyes slowly roll back.

His downward spiral is intercut with news bulletins reporting his arrest for drug trafficking, a charge he shrugs off as a minor irritation. Save for his self-destruction, his sole interest seems to be his estranged son, Shay, for whom the film saves its only sympathy. A promising student, bright and charming, he is the only real casualty in Chads life of indulgence, left alone in the house they share while Dad is bundled into the back of a police car. There is something profoundly lonely about that, and the precious little regard he pays to what people think would be a lot more laudable in circumstances that precluded his son having to confront the inevitable cycle of hope and disappointment that comes with a relationship such as theirs.

Holt is an enigma. Relating to his life as an addict is impossible, and his irresponsibility as a father made me both angry and sad. Yet there remains a geniality to him that is easy to warm to. He is not a violent man, nor an abusive addict; just a sad one. As a character study, Total Badass is a visceral piece of work about an addict whose lifestyle is enabled by sycophants and hangers-on. For a man so often in a crowd, it feels at times as though Chads only real friends are his son and that voice behind the camera, to whom Chad refers with such a detached affection that it often seems as though he is merely addressing himself.

Redemption seems a far away prospect, though he hopes for a fresh start. But as Holt staggers from one wreckage to another, his every fibre epitomising the philosophy that what you can’t drink you must smoke, you can’t help but wonder what will become of him when his luck runs out, and the patience of those who care for him finally tires. I think of what will happen if it does. I fear for what will happen if it doesn’t.

A lot has been written, speculated upon, and debated about regarding Catfish and its authenticity or otherwise. If you’re interested enough to read this then I suspect you’ve also read elsewhere, so I won’t bore you with an exhaustive analysis of its purity. Instead, let’s talk about the movie simply as an experience, as a regular viewer might.

Real or not, stooge or no, Catfish is a convincing enough theatre that it matters not. Central to its endeavour are Nev and his two friends, all 30-something filmmakers from New York. Nev is bright and friendly, and talks a little about an online friend of his, a young girl from Michigan. She straddles the line between admiration and having a harmless crush on Nev, and sometimes sends him charmingly innocent artwork. He’s flattered, I’m sure, and reciprocates in kind with pictures from his travels.

Because this is very much a documentary in the here and now, their relationship is conducted largely over Facebook. Such is the nature of that life, Nev and young Abby begin to build a social web and share their friends. One of them is Megan, Abby’s older sister. Another is her mother. She has quite the extended family, and they all think Nev is great, which he is; that much is clear from the footage. Megan sees it too, and the pair strike up a flirtatious long-distance relationship. They exchange and postcards letters until they can meet, and I watched as they snatched moments on the phone with one another, touched by Nev’s genine feelings for a girl he was yet to meet.

One evening at their flat, their video camera captures the most serendipitous of moments. During an online chat, Nev asks Megan to play him a song. She eagerly agrees and a little later sends over a haunting guitar ballad. Suitably impressed, he asks for another. This time, a piano track comes back, even better than the last. Whether it merely piqued his interest or more profound doubts had taken root isn’t clear, but something leads him to that other most-modern of inventions, Google. In go the heartfelt lyrics that spoke so clearly to him; out comes the deception. The tracks aren’t hers. He reasons they must be her cover versions instead, but they’re not even that.

Nev and his friends set out on a journey to see just how deep the rabbit-hole goes, and that’s where my description must end, because to reveal more would be to spoil the magic. All I will say is that they pay a visit to Megan and her family, and in that home find the tallest of tragic tales, revealing Catfish to be not just a portrait of desperation, but of human tragedy. With a keen eye for detail that belies their inexperience as filmmakers, they ask the right questions at the right times, and are rewarded with footage perfect enough to have critics howling fraud. When things fit together as neatly and as poetically as they do, it’s perhaps understandable.

But watching Catfish for the second time, if there’s fakery going on then I can’t spot it. The body language of all concerned is realistic and typical, perhaps so much so that it can’t help but set off our most cynical of alarm bells. Some of the early footage is, one suspects, a mishmash of the real and the faked-with-good-intentions: that is, they simply couldn’t capture then what they didn’t know, and did so later merely for clarity and our entertainment. Otherwise, everyone seems to have been captured as they were, and if that ain’t true then I’m not sure I want to know.

There are no villains amongst the people of Catfish, much as it would have been easy for the filmmakers to paint them as so. Here, as in life, there are only these tragic characters leading their small lives as best they can. So sometimes Facebook lets them dream a little bigger, and think about what might have been. Big deal. After seeing the reality there in Ishpeming, Michigan, it’s hard to blame them for that.