A documentary by Jeff Malmberg. Unrated. Plays Wednesday, January 19 at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que and Friday, January 21; Sunday to Monday, January 23 and 24; and Wednesday, January 26 at the Vancity Theatre

Fans of documentaries about off-kilter eccentrics, from Grizzly Man to Brother’s Keeper, will find that Mark Hogancamp—the focus of the odd yet oddly rewarding little film Marwencol—can out-strange them all.

Ten years ago, alcoholic artist Hogancamp was beaten outside of a bar so badly that even his own mother didn’t recognize him. He emerged from the hospital with brain damage that robbed him of his memory, his ability to draw, and—most bizarrely of all—his taste for booze.With no insurance to fund therapy and little ability to reassimilate into his small New York hometown, he found a creative outlet and a coping mechanism in the strangest of places: the yard outside his mobile home, where he painstakingly created a one-sixth-scale Second World War–era European town and populated it with historically costumed Barbies and G.I. Joes.

Hogancamp constructs elaborate story lines in this world, where his alter ego, “Hogie”, lives a life far more exciting than his own: falling in and out of love, running a bar where the attraction is nightly “all-girl cat fights”, and fighting Nazi intruders in blood-spattered glory. In fact, it becomes clear that he spends more time in his town, called Marwencol, than he does in the real one.

Hogancamp’s devotion is fascinating: he drags a model jeep for miles on a string to make it look authentically dirty and beat-up, and he spends hours posing his subjects in lifelike embraces and confrontations.

As we follow him deeper into his fantasy world, the movie becomes, by turns, moving and creepy. On one level, it is about art and its ability to heal. It’s also about outsider art, and when the Manhattan establishment finally discovers Hogancamp’s work, there’s an absurdity and awkwardness that offers the perfect flip side to the art-world manipulation in Exit Through the Gift Shop. But where Marwencol succeeds best is in gently and nonjudgmentally unlocking the deep maze of a troubled mind—albeit a talented one.