A documentary about a man who will not sit down is an archive film, whatever the poster calls it. Alex Gibney’s Musk runs 225 minutes with a ten-minute intermission, and its subject is present for every one of them without having granted a single interview; the team made, in Gibney’s words at Toronto, so many formal outreaches and received nothing back except remarks on the man’s own platform. So the film was built from what already existed: more than three years of research, archival interviews and a database of the subject’s own quotations, which the cut spends like small change throughout. I want to count the debts before the assets, because the assets are considerable and the debts are the kind this form always runs up.
The debts, first
The NBC News reviewer, otherwise persuaded, notes that a few passages arrive without evidence: the film boosts the theory that the subject’s satellite constellation meddled in the 2024 election, which independent fact-checkers have long criticized, and it raises data-collection worries about the satellites and the cars without going past the vague. That is the oldest debt of the archive film. When you cannot ask your subject anything, the temptation is to let the cut insinuate what an interview would have had to prove, and three hours and forty-five minutes leave room for a great deal of insinuation. The subject’s lawyer sent the production a letter before release threatening a defamation suit over one of these passages, a text exchange about lasers in space.
A second debt was incurred at the Venice press conference rather than in the cut. Gibney speculated that a difficult childhood in South Africa might explain some of the man’s behaviour, adding the qualifier himself: if one looked at it from a psychoanalytic perspective. One should not. An archive can show you a younger man with thinner hair talking about oil addiction and the same man twenty years on talking about something else entirely; it cannot tell you why. IGN’s Siddhant Adlakha, the one dissenting notice I found, lands his six out of ten exactly there, saying the film re-assembles existing ideas without digging to the root. He is right about the digging and wrong, I think, about the fault. A film without its subject cannot excavate. It can only assemble, and it should say so.
One more, since the ledger is open. A thread on r/AIDiscussion claims the film contains a deepfaked interview with the subject. None of the festival notices I read describes such a sequence, so I treat it as a question for the filmmakers rather than a charge. But it is the right question for this film, whose whole authority rests on the archive being real; a synthetic voice passed off as a recording is the one thing the method cannot survive, and if such a sequence exists, the ethics live entirely in how the cut labels it.
The assets
Now the other column. The best material in Musk, by NBC’s account, is not the critics but the lieutenants, some still on the payroll. There is deposition video of Ashok Elluswamy, a senior Tesla engineer, acknowledging that a 2016 self-driving demonstration did not represent what the cars could do at the time, and there is audio of Jared Birchall, who runs the subject’s personal affairs, on the phone with Ashley St. Clair about child support shortly after she gave birth. Both episodes had been reported in print, by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. The recordings appear to be new, and the craft point is this: a reported fact is a caption, and a recording of the same fact is a scene. When a film finds the tape of what the newspaper already told us, it has not repeated the story; it has staged it for the first time.
The quotation database works the same way. Why does a film with no interview feel, to Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, like a portrait that puts the man together chapter by chapter? Because the subject has been interviewing himself in public for a quarter of a century, and the editors treated that record as the sit-down he refused. The cut from the young man to the present one is the film’s only conversation with its subject, and he gave it without knowing. Bref, the refusal became the engine.
The structure is less tidy, and NBC describes it honestly: stretches that play as political thriller or legal whodunit, others like a video-game simulation, a tabloid, a science-fiction fantasy, and a passage that is plainly horror, in which Gibney narrates the details of collisions involving the driver-assistance software over dashcam footage of a 2019 Florida crash that killed a pedestrian. A purist would call the genre-hopping a seam. I call it the correct response to the material, since the man’s public life has run through all those registers itself. The Wrap’s Ben Croll places the most searing stretch past the three-hour mark, when the subject joins the Trump administration, and notes that Gibney returns at the end to his recurring image of the planet engulfed and inflamed, closing on a note that reframes everything before it. That is a structural decision, not a flourish: the film is built so that its last reel changes the meaning of its first.
Four hours, with an intermission
The producer Jessie Deeter called it a svelte four-hour film at Mill Valley, and the critics mostly back her. Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri was never bored and argues the length allows a dramatic sweep instead of the parade of headlines that usually kills political documentary; Deadline’s Matthew Carey calls the length necessary; The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney could not look away while wondering how healthy 225 minutes of simmering outrage is for anyone. IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio puts the practical case plainly, saying it is hard to imagine audiences sitting through it in a theater rather than over two nights at home, and since HBO Max is where the film goes after its run, that is less a complaint than a description of the release plan.
A detail from The Wrap interests me more: Gibney was still adding to the film hours before the Venice screening. A cut that will not close is the signature of a subject who will not stop generating material, and the intermission is the honest admission that the theatrical form is being stretched to carry what is, quand même, a two-night film. I hold that against a market that gives a picture like this one Friday in Los Angeles and New York before the streamer takes over, not against the film.
The verdict
Judged on execution, Musk earns its length wherever it stays with evidence and loses it wherever it speculates, and the proportion runs heavily in evidence’s favour. It is strongest as an assembly and weakest in the moments it pretends to be an excavation, and I would take the honest assembly every time. The same month, another documentary about another of Gibney’s former subjects, Elizabeth Holmes, opened on the opposite method, thirty-four days inside the subject’s house. Two films, the invited and the refused, in one month. Gibney’s man never sat down. He talked for 225 minutes anyway.
What it took
More than three years of research, by Gibney’s own account in the film, with no participation from the subject. Four production companies, Jigsaw Productions, Closer Media, Anonymous Content and Double Agent, with Jessie Deeter producing. A 225-minute cut with a ten-minute intermission, still being revised hours before its Venice premiere in September 2026, then Toronto and Mill Valley, then a US theatrical release in October 2026, opening in Los Angeles and New York, with HBO Max to follow in late 2026 or early 2027. A defamation-threat letter from the subject’s lawyer before release, answered on First Amendment grounds, and a forum report that Universal wavered on the overseas release. The transferable item for anyone portraying a subject who declines: budget the legal review as a line next to the archive licensing, because this release depended on it as much as on the edit.
I checked a few of the particulars against Rolling Stone’s Toronto dispatch, the NBC News report from Mill Valley, CinemaBlend’s roundup of the Venice notices, Vijesti’s English edition, and a thread or two on r/movies.