This review originally appeared, in a slightly different form, during Sundance 2008. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* opens on six screens today.

A personal interrogative doc, more Morgan Spurlock than Doug Block, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster uses his family’s experiences with steroids as the in point to tackle the larger roles of body perception, performance inhancement and competition in contemporary American culture. The voice of the film, delivered via Bell’s constant narration, can be hackneyed and a bit too reliant on a faux-naivete which belies some of its stronger conclusions, but on the whole Bell mounts a surprisingly sophisticated argument––surprising because he’s a first time feature-maker, surprising because it’s clearly on Bell’s agenda to please his crowd, surprising because this is a film that relies on footage from Rocky 4 to explicate its thesis argument––that steroid criminalization amounts to hating the player whilst willfully ignoring the dynamics of the game.

The second born of three brothers who grew up in an all-American suburb worshiping Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hulk Hogan, Bell examines how his and his siblings attempts to mold themselves in the image of their idols might be a “side effect” of a late-20th century revision of the American dream. He introduces us to a childhood under the influence of a pop culture tapestry that, coming into full force in the mid-1980s, united Ronald Reagan, pro wrestling, sex, violence, celebrity and war, ultimately brainwashing a certain class of adolescent male to strive towards a certain type of competitive physical perfection, ultimately tied to a rah-rah late-Cold War version of patriotism.

Bell hunts down all manner of experts and luminaries, doctors and scientists, athletes and academics and even Arnold himself, and weaves their thoughts and findings into his family’s story to bolster his conclusions. For a first-time filmmaker, Bell is an incredibly adept interviewer, capable of asking the right questions without losing the trust of his subjects. This is certainly a personal film, but it’s also clearly a calling card. Where so many self-examining docs give the sense that the filmmaker could be blowing their wad––ie: everybody’s got *one* story to tell, but does s/he have anything else?––Bell looks to have the talent and intelligence to tackle subjects outside of his immediate purview.

Fittingly for a film about the disorientation of living real life in the shadow of popular culture, some of the Bigger’s strongest points are made via appropriated footage. Essentially, the whole enterprise boils down to a clip borrowed from The Simpsons: Lisa asks Mark McGuire to answer to allegations of steroid use; McGuire says he could tell the truth about his physique, or he could wow the assembled Springfieldians by hitting a bunch of baseballs really hard, and the masses overwhelmingly vote for the latter. It’s all about not wanting to know how the sausage is really made.