Peter Gibson is a modest guy in Montreal who didn’t think of himself as an artist when he started spray-painting stencils on the street; he just had inchoate notions about public space and was fueled by a post-9/11 desire to enter what seemed like a new era of discussion — about, seemingly, everything, but never mind; now seemed like the time to get serious. So he took his cardboard stencils out at night, laid them down on the road and spray-painted mischievous additions to Montreal’s roads: turning cross-walks into gigantic shoe-prints or adding zippers to them, even a mysterious “On” button with no obvious function. Non sequiturs were his mode of choice, explicit verbal statements pretty much not on the table. Then he got arrested and was forced to think, seriously, about whether or not he was an artist or just a guy with a weird compulsion.

At any rate, that’s how Alan Kohl’s zippy documentary Roadsworth: Crossing The Line approaches Gibson; it’s one of the most modest artist profiles I’ve seen, and precisely modesty makes it exciting. Gibson doesn’t have a manifesto; he’s against cars, but he’s not sure what he has to add to that conversation. He allows that maybe his work is “raising questions,” but qualifies with “I guess.” He doesn’t think of his stencils as significant: “This is closer to cartoons than it is to high art,” he offers. (Cue the sputtering of 1,000 outraged comix nerds.) He’s not going to tackle heady theoretical questions, because he doesn’t feel intellectually qualified: “I’ve never read Heidegger or, uh, Kant.” This makes Gibson the perfect artist for that genre of SXSW movies we can’t label anymore: bright and funny, but self-consciously hedging around what he’s doing. (As it happens, it sold out its first screening in the underattended, underpromoted SXGlobal section — shunted off to the 70-seat-capacity Hideout — and got an additional screening. So a hit of sorts. SXSW should do much more to promote this slate, which had uniformly stronger selections than any of the other ones I hit up.)

I should probably admit I don’t care about art in general and don’t connect to 99% of it; Gibson (or Roadsworth, his artistic nom-de-plume) is said to be Canada’s answer to Banksy, which only matters to me abstractly. But I got a big kick out of Roadsworth, partially because the unassuming Gibson is good company, and partially because Alan Kohl is a jazzy doc director; together, they made me care about stuff out of my normal routine (rut?). I don’t know what they put in Canada’s proverbial water, but whenever I see one of their documentaries (and it’s always at SXSW) it’s a cut above what the American equivalent — talking heads, still shots, blatantly staged meetings, officious titles — would be. Kohl begins at nightfall: the clouds time-lapse away, the streetlights click in sympathy with the score, and then there’s just one man out on the street, laying down his tools while constantly watching for police surveillance. As it happens, the day after Kohl started shooting, Gibson got arrested, and the whole project became a different movie.

Roadsworth tracks Gibson’s progression from compulsive street annotater by night/waiter by day to professional artist: it’s less interested in what Gibson’s art might signify than what it means to become a pro, which remains a mysterious process to those of us on the outside. While the mechanics of Gibson’s trial — some 53 separate charges of mischief, with a financial penalty (ostensibly for clean-up purposes) attached to each — grind away internally, Gibson has to figure out whether he feels he’s worthy of turning himself into a cause celebre or should just suck up whatever punishment he’s given. He’s invited to France and, for the first time, is forced to work on commission with a deadline; he goes to Amsterdam for the hell of it and gets arrested again. By the time the trial comes around, he’s no longer an unlikely amateur thrust into the spotlight; he’s making a living off the things he had to do illegally to get started.

Kohl likes to perk up footage by animating Gibson’s work, though sometimes he doesn’t seem to realize he’s undercutting his own points: when the citizens of England’s Ashford roundly revile a line of birds flying down an asphalt road, Gibson has them fly off the road and into the sky, a moment of “magic” (I presume) that doesn’t really fit. But this isn’t just a filmed New Yorker profile: it’s important to see Gibson working in real time. Kohl gets the dramatic proportions exactly right: Gibson chooses not to fight the city but take their deal and get to work on commissions for them. He’s bored by questions about whether or not he’s “sold out,” which people actually ask him with a straight face. Yet for all his unassuming nature, Gibson does eventually raise the questions he wanted to raise, even if he couldn’t quite formulate them at the outset: if you’re an anti-establishment artist, do you have to get arrested to get credibility? When you’re “reclaiming” public space, are you really starting a conversation with the city or just doing it for yourself? If it has to be cleaned up, who pays? And what does it mean to call yourself an “artist,” assuming you’re not a deluded art school kid? Roadsworth tackles all those questions, but it never announces itself as doing so; show, not tell. More (American) documentaries should trust their audiences this much.