Alex Gibney has spent two decades perfecting one kind of film: the forensic autopsy of concentrated power, from Enron’s traders to the Church of Scientology to Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes. Pointing that apparatus at Elon Musk was always the logical endpoint, and the teaser now circulating for ‘Musk’ signals that Gibney intends to prosecute the world’s richest man at the scale of his subject — nearly four hours, in two parts, with an intermission.

The teaser is built on a reversal. It opens on admirers, one of whom calls Musk ‘the greatest capitalist in history,’ before the register curdles into the voices the film clearly prefers: interviewees who describe him as ‘chaotic, random, capricious’ and ‘manifestly cruel and selfish,’ and one who concludes that ‘in a science fiction novel, he would not be a hero.’ The most Gibney-like touch is the score — an original David Byrne song, ‘Let Me Sell You a Dream,’ co-written with composer Daniel Pemberton and stitched together from Musk’s own public statements. It is the director’s signature move, letting the subject supply the case against himself, set to music.

Gibney won an Oscar for ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ and turned ‘Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,’ ‘Going Clear’ and ‘The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley’ into a template for the investigative feature. The pedigree around ‘Musk’ matches the ambition: the producing ranks include Ronan Farrow and Pulitzer winner Lawrence Wright, with Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions alongside Anonymous Content, Double Agent and Closer Media.

The release plan is the real gamble. Bleecker Street, in the middle of a busy awards season, will open the 235-minute cut theatrically before HBO carries it to premium cable and streaming, with Universal handling international. Asking audiences to sit with a four-hour, two-part indictment in a cinema is a wager that the Musk story now carries the urgency of an event rather than a stream-at-home explainer.

The documentary premieres out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, with a North American bow to follow at Toronto, ahead of an October 16 theatrical opening. Whatever the verdict at the box office, Gibney has engineered the season’s sharpest irony: a portrait that lets its subject narrate his own prosecution, and dares him to object.

Tags: documentary, Elon Musk, festival-deal, Bleecker Street, Alex Gibney, David Byrne