Whether a film is a documentary or a fictional drama, all modern cinema is in a sense docu-fictional, because most viewers know that a documentary is carefully crafted to yield a narrative and that the making of a fictional film is often as good a story as the one in the script. In the new docu-fiction “Invention,” directed by Courtney Stephens and starring Callie Hernandez—who shares the “by” credit with Stephens and whose actual family history provides the film’s premise—fiction and nonfiction overlap and intertwine to vertiginous effect. Yet this distinctive form is only one aspect of the film’s modernity. “Invention” proves to be nothing less than an up-to-the-minute report on the American state of mind—on the epidemic inability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Callie Hernandez plays a character slyly named Carrie Fernandez, who travels to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, to claim the ashes of her late father, John, a doctor who was long involved in alternative medicine. She meets with the professional executor of his estate (James N. Kienitz Wilkins), who tells her that her father left many unpaid debts and a tangled legal web (including accounts and business entities under multiple names), and also left her his patent for an electromagnetic medical device, which ostensibly brings transformative (if hardly well-defined) benefits to those who sit in front of it. Then, poking around in the attic of her dad’s house, she finds the gizmo itself—a cylindrical array of colorful glass tubes roughly the size of a table lamp and topped with a magnetic coil—and decides to investigate.

Carrie’s inquiry takes her to the businesses and homes of various people whose names turn up in her father’s papers. Some are investors, such as his friend Tony (Tony Torn), who owns an antique store, and Henri (Caveh Zahedi), a suave wheeler-dealer who’d tried to connect him with venture capitalists; there’s also a machine-shop owner (Joe Swanberg) who had the contract to manufacture the devices. Carrie already knew that her father was self-absorbed and irresponsible. Now she learns that he was considered brilliant—known locally as Dr. J.—and also, depending on whom she talks to, persuasive, secretive, paranoid, and deceptive. She meets a woman named Babby (Lucy Kaminsky), who cleaved to Dr. J as to a cult leader, swears by his device, and believes, among other things, that England owns the United States, that a “quantum banking system” will spew money into all accounts, and that Carrie’s father was “taken out.” Another friend of Carrie’s dad, a clockmaker named Paul (Paul Kleiman) who works in Tony’s store, frets about global domination by a supreme Freemason, thinks that what the world’s power centers have in common are obelisks—“the lost penis of Osiris”—and believes that the late Dr. J’s electromagnetic device is viable. “The body’s electric,” he reasons. “Even Walt Whitman was concerned about electricity.” (When Carrie tries the device herself, it gives her acidulously colored psychedelic visions.)

In short, Carrie gets into deep water pretty quickly. But, as it turns out, the water was plenty deep before she even realized it, as soon as she set foot in her father’s neighborhood—the movie was filmed in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—and immersed herself in its peculiar social setting. Her father’s house, which he rented using investors’ funds, is considered luxurious by locals, although the area, Tony tells Carrie, is filled with “people with deep pockets” and also with people (Tony and her dad included) seeking “reinvention.” Another one of Tony’s employees, a failed comedian named Sham (Sahm McGlynn), takes her to an “Alice in Wonderland”-themed cornfield maze (such a place exists). He refers to it as a place where “fancy yoga moms” go; Carrie, despite her elegant bearing, isn’t one. Her dad’s investor Henri lives on waterfront property, where, sitting in a lounge chair facing the river and smoking pot with Carrie, he tells her that this is where he frequently retreats to read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”: “He’s asking, ‘What are you doing here and why?’ Your dad was always asking those questions.”

And perhaps he did. But Carrie’s dad also went on television to promote bogus medical devices and dubious supplements and made videos advancing pseudoscientific theories to sell his wares. Stephens includes many such clips in the film, letting them play out at fascinatingly seductive length. Note: the doctor in them, John Hernandez (not Fernandez), is the real-life father of the actress Callie Hernandez (not Carrie Fernandez). John Hernandez died in 2021, and the story of “Invention” arose from Callie’s bereavement and its ensuing complications. As the warping of father and daughter’s names implies, the film wears its fictionalizations brazenly: it features well-known filmmakers, such as Swanberg, in dramatic roles and interstitial scenes, marked by closeups of a lighted candle, in which cast and crew are heard discussing scenes that have just been shot and revealing them to be improvised (“let the magic happen”).

The magic does indeed happen—the wondrous deceptions, the seeming distortions of reality, the sense of strangeness. The dramatic scenes of “Invention” are filled with oddball details, such as the machine-shop owner’s insistence on kneeling to pray in his office, Sham’s flailing standup routine, the kitsch eeriness of the cornfield maze, Henri’s slick enthusiasm, Babby’s confessional torrents, a funeral director noodling at the organ by remote control. Often the oddity comes from the chilling drone of bureaucracy: the executor’s compassionate thicket of legal reasoning, an airline representative’s denial of Carrie’s quest for a bereavement discount, the dollars and cents of Dr. J’s cremation (for which Carrie is retroactively billed). In the face of this workaday jangle of strangeness and complexity, paranoia starts to seem like a perfectly rational response. This hectic oddness undergirds the conspiracy theories and wild extrapolations that course through the film and provides the rickety intellectual architecture for Dr. J.’s mercenary speculations.

“Invention” is a film about pollution—media pollution, the despoiling of the American mind along with the landscape. From the foothills of the Berkshires arises a venerable strain of American madness, the poetry of hokum—the old weird America of medicine shows and travelling circuses and carnivals. But, instead of being homegrown, this madness is now echoed through media, the manic commercial reverberations of the airwaves, represented not just by the clips of Dr. J.’s eager sales pitches but also by snippets of sensationalized news reports and the speculations of talk-radio crackpots. Florid and lurid twists of mind, surfacing locally, have been amplified and electrified and weaponized, and this media pollution is as authentically American as the smog from Detroit-built cars and the soot from coal and the sludge from local factories. (In this regard, “Invention” reminds me of another great Great Barrington movie of media madness: “Pretty Poison,” from 1968, starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld.)

In this exploited environment, the cosseted luxe of Henri’s waterside estate plays like an oblivious perversion of the Thoreauvian ideal. At the same time, however, the region’s still-thriving natural splendors—as filmed by Stephens—suggest a form of living reclamation and intimate resistance. Interstitial images of spectacularly wooded hills, forests, foliage, the Housatonic River, and other vistas punctuate the movie throughout, in cinematography (by Rafael Palacio Illingworth) that beholds them as plain wonders, the face of the world. In that mighty visage, Stephens and Hernandez tease out a theme of grand scope and urgency. The references to nineteenth-century American literary heroes and ideals may be distorted, but the ideals find an authentic embodiment in these calmly rapturous images of nature. At a manageable seventy-two minutes, “Invention” moves, for all its tangles and lurches, at a graceful, contemplative pace, in homespun textures and images of spare clarity; shot in 16-mm., it has a grain that makes it feel nearly handmade—an apt aesthetic for engagement with nature. The transcendentalists’ powerful ideas, albeit obscured by commodification and cons, emerge as enduring and ambient, as readily accessible through modest and local artistic creation as through their books. On the other hand, Stephens and Hernandez don’t seem especially optimistic. ♦