-By Kevin Lally

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I resisted the allure of graffiti art until I saw the work of Banksy, the anonymous British street artist who brings an unparalleled level of cheeky, satirical wit and theatricality to the medium. His mischievous provocations are invariably too delightful or too astute to be dismissed as mere vandalism, whether it’s the shadow of a little girl carried away by balloons, stenciled on the Israeli West Bank barrier, or a drawing of a naked man hanging onto a faux window sill outside a sex clinic.

Banksy now makes his film directing debut with Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary about the street-art subculture with an appropriately eccentric backstory. You see, Exit didn’t start out as a film by Bansky, but a film about Banksy and his contemporaries. The original filmmaker, or so it would seem, was Thierry Guetta, a French shopkeeper who gained entrée to Banksy’s world through his cousin, a celebrated illegal mosaic artist named Invader. Recording even the most mundane moments of his life with a video camera, Guetta obtained a rare inside look at the clandestine operations of Banksy (always seen hooded or in silhouette) and other artists, on the pretext that he was making a documentary. In fact, there never was a documentary, just thousands of hours of unsorted footage.

Guetta eventually did try to make something of his recordings—an incoherent, frenetically edited collage he titled Life Remote Control, which Banksy describes as the work of “somebody with mental problems.” Thus was born Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy’s own attempt to tell the story of street art and the surprising odyssey of the singularly flaky but unstoppable Thierry Guetta.

With Guetta’s footage as his foundation, Banksy has crafted both a very diverting history of the guerrilla art movement and a fascinating portrait of his once-lowly acolyte. The big twist here is that Guetta has an ego fully equal to that of the celebrated mavericks he idolizes, and when his film project is rejected, he sets his mind on invading their turf and becoming a big-time street artist himself. Inspired by Banksy’s own acceptance by the legit art world and his transition to high price tags at Sotheby’s and major shows, Guetta plans his own giant installation in Los Angeles under the name “Mr. Brainwash.” The overstuffed show cribs shamelessly from Andy Warhol and other pop artists in a kind of “Mad Libs” approach and is an improbable success. You can read into that an indictment of Los Angeles culture or the public’s susceptibility to hype, or else a kinder assessment that art truly is in the eye of the beholder. Bemused by the irony of it all, sometime-rebel Banksy dryly notes, “Thierry missed out on all the ‘years refining his craft’ bits.”

Although Thierry Guetta winds up stealing this film about street artists, there’s enough of Banksy here (and his always amusing bon mots) to give us a fuller picture of the mysterious prankster than we’ve ever had before, including such landmark outrages as his Gitmo-inspired invasion of Disneyland and his 2006 “Barely Legal” show featuring a live, floral-painted “elephant in the room.”

Guetta counters his critics (including those in the guerrilla art world) at the end of the film, proclaiming himself a work-in-progress: “You’ll see in time who I will be.”

But let’s give Banksy the last word on the fluke success of the curious Mr. Guetta: “Maybe it means art is a bit of a joke.”