OK, it’s not that much of an older release, but I was talking to someone recently who had plowed through seemingly all of this year’s top-shelf documentaries, and yet somehow had missed Werner Herzog’s superb Grizzly Man, from 2005. Ergo, this re-up, originally published as part of a 2005-in-film retrospective for Now Playing Magazine on December 23 of last year:

Man, nature and the beguiling grey area in between get a workout in Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing, strangely affecting documentary Grizzly Man, which focuses on the unusual life and violent death of a self-styled grizzly bear expert and amateur preservationist.

A college washout and alcoholic would-be actor who in his 30s gave up marijuana and drink cold turkey and reinvented himself with a Prince Valiant bob and phony Australian accent (the latter eventually giving way to a high-pitched, slightly effeminate surfer patois of indistinct region), Timothy Treadwell lived unarmed in the Alaskan wilderness among bears for 13 summers, and filmed his adventures in the wild during his final five seasons. With himself as the central character, Treadwell crafted strange, idiosyncratic narratives of high confession. He would live alone for weeks and sometimes months, staging and engaging in therapeutic soliloquies, rants and imagined conversations with his animal “friends.” There’s a pained, natural beauty to this odd and startling footage — from which Herzog chiefly carves his narrative, along with fantastic music of accompaniment from Richard Thompson.

Enigmatic, alluring, personable and infuriating in equal parts, Treadwell fancied himself a fuzzy, New Age professional “protector” of wildlife. It was in October 2003, though, that Treadwell’s mutilated remains, along with those of his on-again/off-again, quasi-girlfriend Amie Huguenard, would be discovered near their campsite in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Reserve. The pair had been mauled and devoured by a grizzly (and the attack audio-recorded), perhaps one of the very bears Treadwell so lovingly photographed.

Grizzly Man isn’t exacting as a biography of Treadwell (we don’t meet his parents and get a glimpse of his formative years until an hour into the affair, and the movie takes at face value the urban legend — seemingly testable — that Treadwell finished runner-up to Woody Harrelson for the role of Woody Boyd on Cheers), but that will come neither as a surprise to Herzog fans nor an irritation to those new to the director. In true Herzogian fashion, Grizzly Man offers up not only ruminations on the mysteries of the wild that the title and subject matter augur (in one ferocious fight, a bear even releases his bowels), and its relationship to an Earth that is no longer its domain, but also separate and distinct mysteries of human nature — what drove the flaky and yet heartbreakingly approachable Treadwell, for instance, and who was Huguenard, briefly glimpsed only once on tape?

Herzog “investigates” these questions only to the degree to which it interests his thesis that the world is a place of sustained disarray and unhappiness in which only untenable respite can be achieved. He also draws parallels — chaos, disorder and murder — between Grizzly Man and his own work, including the famously deranged production of Fitzcarraldo, and includes interviews with Treadwell’s pilot friend and the examining coroner, the latter of which may or may not be staged.

Grizzly Man seems, I know, too small and exclusive to be anything more than an ornamental pleasure, a cinematic postcard for a few. But in its concluding moments, as Treadwell works himself up into a sputtering, incandescent rage in an amazing, self-pitying and paranoia-tinged rant against the national park service, you glimpse a stranger in modern society, this world of asphalt and glass — and in its basest, most distilled form, a piece of the innate humanity in all of us. Grizzly Man is a portrait of a cracked American original, but this one man’s brokenness proves oddly and profoundly moving. (Lionsgate, R, 103 mins.)