Who’d watch a movie about an intellectual? There were some eccentrics once upon a time – Wittgenstein beat children, Heidegger wore lederhosen and Foucault was into kinky sex – but these days even the most daring intellectuals seem to lead rather dreary lives. Slavoj Zizek is an exception. As a thinker he ranks with the very greatest. But it’s the uncanny popularity of his eccentricities that has won him the accolade of this documentary film.

I’d love to know what drugs Zizek is taking. He is the intellectual equivalent of one of those Cold War Olympic athletes with grotesquely distended muscles, attracting attention because they are so repulsive. Zizek’s freakish eccentricities make you think he must be clever, just as you know the athletes with the rippling muscles must be strong. He fits the stereotype perfectly, a bearded neurotic with wild eyes and wilder hair, covering his audience in spittle as he raves about psychoanalysis, Marxism and poststructuralism. The film follows him around the world, speaking to packed audiences and getting mobbed by his fans.

At his best, Zizek is overwhelming and exhilarating and exciting. He makes the hardest and most arcane theory seem desperately urgent, with lively and quirky examples that keep bringing the ideas down to earth. When he jumps from German philosophy to Hollywood movies, from dialectics to dirty jokes, he never seems to trivialise the ideas or condescend to his audience. His strategy is the opposite of the philistine popularisers; rather than make grand ideas seem commonplace, he challenges us by making the commonplace seem strange and disconcerting.

But the movie shows another side of Zizek.  gain and again he tries to tell us that he hates his celebrity, but he just can’t hide his delight as he signs autographs. Zizek tells us it’s the work that matters and not the man, and he shares with us his irritation at his fans’ demands. But he clearly loves it.  Sometimes he seems even to revel in his own peculiarity. In his Ljubljana flat Zizek proudly (and daftly) shows us how he keeps his clothes in the kitchen drawers. It is hard to tell how far his strangeness is self-conscious: could anyone so well-versed in psychoanalysis really be unaware of how he appears to the world?  It’s hard to resist the temptation to (over-)analyse, and see the self-presentation as a way of marketing the ideas.

But enough of the man; what about the movie? Director Astra Taylor has done a fine job with an impossible brief. Zizek is a hard man to film, and it is even harder to convey his ideas. The movie manages both; its form belies its sophistication. Mostly, Zizek just speaks. We see him interacting with audiences across the world, talking to his publisher and playing with his kid. Coming to this cold, you’d have no idea why this guy is so famous. Instead of experts coming on to tell us how much they dig him, Zizek is left to talk for himself. He comes across as a weirdo, which undoubtedly he is, but has every opportunity to talk about the ideas as well. 

There is a samizdat quality to the filming, and difficult sometimes to hear the dialogue. All the better to focus on the material, in my opinion. There are biographical snippets, like the ludicrous attempt at the Slovenian presidency (which he apparently nearly won – a truly terrifying prospect!); and scenes that show him interacting ambivalently with his admirers. Broken up between them are compelling accounts of his ideas, which are presented with imagination and verve that makes it all worthwhile.

This movie is great fun for groupies like me. But if you haven’t discovered Zizek yet, you would do best to start with the books before looking at the man. Then watch the film; by that stage, you’ll be in sore need of some light relief.