Borchardt's passion is filmmaking. A disciple of George Romero, Borchardt has been making short splatter flicks since high school, but his dream project is Northwestern, a non-horror, autobiographical feature about "rust and decay." An impassioned defense of his friends' alcohol-fueled camaraderie and an elegy for the Springsteenian landscapes of Borchardt's native Midwest, the early footage of Northwestern looks like a mythopoetic Dazed and Confused, like The Last Picture Show for Beavis and Butthead kids.

As American Movie opens, Borchardt has gathered a hodge-podge of film-school students, childhood friends, and amateur actors to begin pre-production on Northwestern. After a few months, Borchardt realizes that he has neither the finances nor organization to really get started on Northwestern, so he lowers his sights. He embarks on the project of completing "Coven," a Night of the Living Dead-inspired horror short that he'd begun years earlier.

One of the significant pleasures of American Movie is its lovingly rendered but honest depiction of a milieu you don't often seen in a feature film. Borchardt's (and Smith's) working class Midwest of suburban slackers, freeway strip malls, wide-open spaces, and Lotto tickets gets its due here. In this way, American Movie acts as a corrective to Fargo that "classic" from the relentlessly smug Coen brothers that seems to have defined the Upper Midwest for too many moviegoers.

A common criticism of American Movie has been that it's a condescending and exploitative examination of a "filmmaker" who amounts to little more than a modern-day Ed Wood. But this strain of criticism seems to have more to say about the class-biases and aesthetic myopia of those leveling the charges than it does about the film itself. In fact, the clips of Borchardt's films shown in American Movie reveal a pretty talented filmmaker.

Those who claim that American Movie is exploitative also miss just how complicit Borchardt is in its creation. Borchardt seems a far more knowing crafter of his hick-stoner persona that most reviewers have been willing to admit he downplays his own intelligence, and the self-deprecating humor that Borchardt draws so many laughs from is endemic to the region and to the milieu. The secret of American Movie is that Borchardt becomes (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not) both the film's star and uncredited screenwriter. His unmade epic Northwestern is to be a grand statement about his own life, friends, and philosophy but he can't get the money to finish it. So Borchardt does the next best thing; he essentially turns American Movie itself into Northwestern.