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Published: 25 February 2010
by DAN CARRIER

EXIT Through The Gift Shop is a film with barbs, full of jokes aimed at artists and art buyers, and is about one of the greatest contemporary artists of our era defending his legacy. 

Ever since Bristolian graffiti artist Banksy began stencilling his statements on walls around the country, he has been a celebrated enigma, and this is the first feature about the man with the can.

It starts off with enough pop references to suggest you are in for an underground treat: a  montage of adverts eventually merges into one slogan, telling us to “Buy This Nonsense”, which, in the opening three minutes, tells us the film’s premise.

It goes like this: Los Angeles-based Frenchman Thierry was the owner of a successful clothes shop, selling vintage tat at hyper-inflated prices to people who were trendy mugs (a point the film returns to later, but it is art, not clothes they are hoovering up). We learn that Thierry has had an addiction to filming everything – everything, no matter how mundane – in his life. 

On a holiday in France, he films his cousin making mosaics shaped like Space Invaders, which he then sticks up around Paris. Suddenly he is hooked on street art and he begins to follow a procession of artists about. Eventually he meets Banksy, the daddy of them all, whom he persuades to be the subject of a film. 

“Most art has been made to last 100 years but street art is not like that and we needed someone who could use a camera,” explained Banksy. 

Except when Banksy watches the results, he declares it is ‘“shit” and that Thierry seems to be “ill, deluded and with an attention span of about six seconds”. 

As Banksy says: “The story is a film about a man who made a documentary about me, but was more interesting than me. It is not Gone with The Wind but there’s a moral in there somewhere.” 

Things go from bad to worse when Thierry reinvents himself as a street artist called Mr Brainwash and throws a lavish event to sell the vast array of pieces he has created by numbers.

Banksy’s attempts to keep his face a secret means he appears with his hoodie pulled up, face cast in shadow, like the baddie in the Star Wars films, while his voice has been doctored like a Gerry Adams interview in the 1980s.

Banksy is fun, his work is graphically good, the bastard offspring of the pop art movement. 

It is political, makes statements, gets you thinking. And then there is the idea that you just don’t know when it will appear next – the overnight appearance of a Banksy is an event to cherish. 

But sadly, the film sheds too little light on him. 

We learn little of his influences and motivation. Did he go to art school, for example? Has he ever been nicked (and did Plod know who he was when he felt his collar – he MUST have been done once, considering the immense amount of work he has done in naughty places!). 

This movie is on general release as of next week, but this week you can saunter down to Waterloo, go to Leake Street which is under the station, and watch it in a makeshift cinema. called the Lambeth Palace, based in Victorian arches: it has some art to tickle you, and best of all, you can get yourself a can of spray paint and go and decorate the tunnel outside. 

“Just in case you came out of the movie desperate to copy what you’ve seen on screen I thought we’d build a cinema where you were able to paint all over the walls,” says Banksy.