A documentary by Ben Steinbauer. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, September 10, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

There’s something a bit frightening about some YouTubers. It’s not just that many of them are deficient in politics, philosophy, and culture. It is, rather, that their fascination with five-minute bursts of piffle stems from the fact that they can no more watch an episode of Seinfeld than they can enjoy reading Oedipus Rex in ancient Greek. In the age of the attenuated attention span, theirs are the shortest of them all.

Five years ago, Fred Rebney unknowingly became one of the “stars” of this on-line medium. Twelve years before that, he had been the flack in an industrial film aimed at selling recreational vehicles. This nondescript Midwestern promotional piece would undoubtedly have been forgotten forever if someone hadn’t compiled an outtake reel of the salesman’s outbursts whenever he flubbed a line or the production crew goofed. Consisting largely of unimaginative obscenities, this clandestine footage would eventually earn Rebney the sobriquet “Angriest Man in the World” after his tantrums belatedly reached the Net.

Winnebago Man is Ben Steinbauer’s attempt to make sense of this phenomenon. Toward this end, the filmmaker both tries to track down his elusive hero and define the ethos peculiar to YouTube celebrity. When he does eventually make contact, the documentarist must then convince the aging recluse to participate in a found-film-footage festival (even after the poor guy goes blind).

Unfortunately, Steinbauer himself appears to be just a little bit too YouTube for the task at hand. Whenever the Winnebago Man wants to talk about something serious, his interlocutor tries to get him to open up about his past or cut loose with a string of painfully ordinary oaths (Rebney is no oral Henry Miller).

So, yes, this film does have an audience. Unfortunately, it’s not an audience of cinephiles.