It's out on DVD this week — which I don't yet have a copy of, and likely won't — but Unknown White Male is still a film with such inherently interesting subject matter that I thought I'd throw up this review, which originally ran in concert with the movie's limited theatrical release late this February. To wit:

Directed by Rupert Murray, Unknown White Male tells the remarkable, fascinating and true story of Douglas Bruce, a 30-something New Yorker whose identity has been pieced together and re-forged, sans a lifetime’s worth of comfortable reference points. On the evening of July 1, 2003, Bruce chatted with a friend by phone and made informal plans for dinner. At 7 a.m. the next morning, he snapped out of a fugue state and found himself alone on a subway headed for Coney Island. He didn’t know how he’d got there, where he was going or even who he was. All experiential memory was lost; he was without identity.

With no wallet or ID card, no sense of what door the keys in his pocket might unlock, and only the random, sparse contents of a small backpack on his person, Bruce wandered into a police station and asked for help. For days he was a medical sideshow attraction — the confused and panicked, but polite and slightly English-accented fellow who bore no outside traces of drug abuse, significant physical trauma or neurological illness.

Multiple MRIs and CAT scans reveal a small pituitary tumor in Bruce’s brain, but one present probably since birth and in theory unrelated to memory function. An array of blood tests and all manner of stringent psychological questioning goes nowhere, and a scrap of paper with a name and phone number initially yields no clues. Stricken by retrograde amnesia, there is absolutely nothing to connect Bruce to anything in the outside world. It’s only when he’s being committed, and asked to sign a piece of paper, that a flash occurs: his purely instinctive, chicken-scratch signature clearly begins with the letter “D.” Still, this leads nowhere fast.

That aforementioned phone number eventually does unlock his past, and from there Bruce begins a journey through a still inexplicable maze. There’s a cool detachment to Bruce that’s fascinating to witness. It’s as if all the accrued baggage of adulthood — the acrimony, the petty grievances, but also all the shared social fabric that tethers us together in invisible but tangible ways — has been stripped away, replaced by a confounding, impassive naiveté. In casting off old “friends” and habits alike, and retaining or rehabilitating some elements of his former self, Bruce’s plight presents a parallel challenge to his family and all those who knew him, for they too must bury their memories of the man they once recognized.

Director Murray, a longtime friend of Bruce’s, walks us emphatically if not ardently through Bruce’s quest, cobbling together past video footage, photographs, recreations, some astonishing footage Bruce himself shot in the days and weeks after the incident, and, of course, plenty of interviews. Yet to call Unknown White Male a collage or pastiche imbues it with a certain handmade quiltedness that the movie doesn’t really possess or embrace. There’s far less detailed sit-down sessions with Bruce than one might imagine about the frightened search for emotional reference points — the panicky mental equivalent, one imagines, of constantly feeling for furniture in the dark — and as the movie wears on and Bruce becomes less and less worried about ever regaining his memory, Murray’s inquisitiveness seems to somewhat mirror this shrugging nonchalance.

Still, Unknown White Male is a film whose subject matter is so engrossing that it pulls you along, and there are all sorts of weird, emotional EKG spikes, as when Bruce wakes up in his old apartment for the first time and asks the “friend” staying with him where his mother is. She’s dead, several years on, but in that person having to relate that to Bruce — and having it subsequently related to us here — the movie charts and highlights in very affecting fashion certain basic universalities of human experience that are apparently engrained in all of us, memory be damned. (Wellspring, unrated, 87 mins.)