Facebook friending, with cameras rolling

Some will be disappointed, but "Catfish" is not, as it turns out, a biography of the former Yankee great. Like Jim "Catfish" Hunter, however, it does throw curveballs - some of them quite painful, as truth can tend to be.

Unlike so-called hybrid documentaries, which blur the line between fiction and artifice, "Catfish" observes a blurring of the line between fiction and life: When a New York dance photographer named Nev Schulman begins an online correspondence with a young girl who makes paintings of his published work, he becomes involved - via his keypad - with Abby's entire family, and even begins a Facebook romance with her older sister, Meg. Then reality intrudes and "Catfish" shifts into Hitchcock mode.

How fortunate that Schulman's brother Ariel and their friend Henry Joost had the foresight to begin making a movie about Nev at just such a moment! This seems to be the one rogue question about "Catfish" - not the motivation for anyone to, shall we say, enhance one's life online; the motives for that become evident and even understandable. But the foresight of the filmmakers here seems like kismet, and that's giving them the best of it.

The on-the-fly footage of "Catfish" is interspersed with creative graphics and some deft editing by Zachary Stuart-Pontier. The three principals - Nev Schulman and his two directors - aren't very good actors, or at least very comfortable on camera, so one is sometimes left with a feeling of theatricality. One is also left with the feeling that "Catfish" was inevitable, a movie that feels both archetypal, and very much of the moment.