Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal is One of Many Genre-Defying Projects.

Sometimes, art imitates life. And sometimes life is a movie. One that imitates life, which imitates art. In season two of HBO’s hit comedy series The Rehearsal, comedian and performance artist Nathan Fielder blurs life, art, and TV. He uses his network resources to go big, examining plane crashes and how pilots communicate in the cockpit. Fielder, in typical fashion, takes hair brained ideas to the extreme. Often small details are inflated to comedic levels but prove tangential to the episode. The series, like his Comedy Central series Nathan For You, features Fielder playing a version of himself, working with real people and actors in a kaleidoscopic genre-bending performance art that might be described as quasi-investigative comedic documentary.

Alexandra Tanner at The Point describes The Rehearsal:

All at once a cringe comedy, a docuseries, an improvisational exercise, a piece of gonzo journalism, a well-funded lab study, a surrealist ballet, a prestige drama, and a piece of theater of cruelty, The Rehearsal is serious and silly, ridiculous and self-ridiculing, frequently unearthing and then just as quickly burying the real—burying it, and then just as quickly unearthing it—over and over again, sometimes within the span of seconds.

The art critic Dean Kissick in a column for Spike Art Magazine tries to make sense of the life-and-art collapse,

While pop used to offer a fantasy, social media and reality TV offered performances of authenticity; the acting out of fictions that feel real. The game is not to recover authenticity for yourself but to perform it for others. What is lost is the real world, which is sinking below its representations.

As the world around us gets weirder, reality and fiction get ever closer. Here are eight more movies (and one book) for anyone interested in movies that incorporate polymathic combinations of art, film, fiction, and non-fiction.

In 2003, a group of eight artists in Providence, Rhode Island snuck into the local mall and set up a clandestine apartment inside an overlooked gap in the building’s architecture. Led by artists Michael Townsend and Adriana Valdez Young, the crew spent four years hanging out in their clubhouse, right under the noses of mall security. With a small hidden camera, they documented their long-term art performance, using the quirks of the mall architecture to expand their joke into something deeply serious. Is it life or art? And is this a documentary or just a snapshot of their time spent deep within the “nowhere space” of the mall?

As a kid growing up, I didn’t understand that Pee Wee Herman was played by Paul Reubens. The network TV show Pee Wee’s Playhouse and the movie Pee Wee’s Big Adventure both loomed large, but Paul Reubens, the comedian and artist behind the show, was a mystery. Reubens had purposely foregrounded his alter ego Pee Wee and hid himself from the public spotlight, making appearances on TV shows like The Tonight Show with David Letterman as the character. Pee Wee as Himself is an intimate portrait of Reubens, and sheds light on the man behind the character.

The documentary draws on 40 hours of interviews with Reubens, who initiated the documentary while secretly battling cancer. It traces his start growing up in Sarasota, Florida around the circus performers of the The Ringling Brothers, which was headquartered there. It then shows the influence of Reubens’s time in art school at CalArts and his experience with the improv group The Groundlings, where he worked with comedians such as Phil Hartman. The character of Pee Wee was an amalgamation of 1950s kids shows like The Shari Lewis Show and the the freneticism of the 1980s LA punk scene. All were swirled together to take performance and pop art into the mainstream in what Reubens described as “live action cartoons.”

When the film industry (and everything else) shut down in 2020, actor Zack Wiener was living with his mom on New York City’s Upper West Side. He decided to make a movie by running for city council, taking on Manhattan political stalwart Gale Brewer. With a real campaign staff of actors and his friends, he sets out on an extended Jackass-like adventure that is simultaneously sincere and completely ridiculous.

This fictional tale collapses the internet, theater, and the movie screen into a dystopian world where, with the creation of a world blurring online and offline, the three merge into a secret fourth thing. Rachel (Betsey Brown) is trapped in an advertising firm’s experiment for which she is made to give user feedback about Mommy 6.0, a pop star. The film has been surrounded by controversy, as a group of New York’s downtown art crowd gathered at the Daryl Roth Theatre to film several scenes, which most poignantly comment on what it means to be online today with pressures from both commercial forces and our peers.

Videoheaven (2025), dir. Alex Ross Perry

Taking the form of an academic essay, Alex Ross Perry’s encyclopedic Videoheaven tells the story of the video store in popular culture. Rather than rely on simple nostalgia, the three-hour epic collage uses clips from mainstream and cult films to portray video stores as a third space and cultural touchpoint—sometimes positively, and sometimes less so. Like many academic essays, it can be at times overwhelming to follow both Maya Hawke’s dense narration and the action in the associated clips. However, the movie ultimately tells a beautiful story of the video store’s complex evolution from an underground portal to new worlds, to ubiquitous sterile corporate space, to zombified ruin. Videoheaven will be showing July 2-5 at IFC Center in New York, with wide release later this year.

The Code (2025), dir. Eugene Kotlyarenko

The Code is director Eugene Kotlyarenko’s latest project. Set in the surreality of the Covid-19 pandemic, it utilizes a toolbelt of different cameras–from cell phones to spy sunglasses to surveillance cams–to construct a kaleidoscopic film. Celine (Dasha Nekrasova) and Jay (Peter Vack) are trying to repair their relationship. All the while, Celine makes a movie about it. Set in a rental house in the desert, the film weaves traditional movie shots, security cameras, phone cameras, screen recordings, and handheld “documentary” footage, building a unique visual language that mirrors the layered story being told.

Pavements (2024), dir. Alex Ross Perry

Is it a documentary, a biopic, or a musical? And is it about music history, a reunion tour, or an exhibition? Yes. Alex Ross Perry’s chaotic dive into the indie band Pavement follows them on a 2022 reunion tour and traces their history alongside their late spike in popularity. Instead of opting for the documentary format’s neat combination of past and filming of the present, Perry serves up a maximalism that plays with reality, taking viewers through a chaotic reconstruction of Pavement’s rise and fall via a Broadway style musical and biopic with Hollywood actors. For fans of the band, it is a nostalgic journey across the career of the genre-defining slacker rock band which made a deep impression on their generation. For those unfamiliar with Pavement, it is a wild, multi-angled glimpse of that angst-ridden era of rock music: the 1990s. It will be available for streaming on July 11 via Mubi.

J. Hoberman’s expansive history of 1960s New York shows the range of creative experimentation and influence of the period. From artists Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol, to comedian Lenny Bruce and jazz musician Ornette Coleman, the explosion of creative output was tied directly to the social proximity of the neighborhoods—beginning with the Beats of the 1950s, and moving through Fluxus art movement, underground film, and everything in between. As cultural critic Mike Davis says on the book’s jacket, “J Hoberman is simply the best historian of that hallucinatory decade when politics imitated celluloid and movies invaded reality.” The Rehearsal wouldn’t be possible without it.