Almost everything written about Primetime so far looks at one face. Critics read Robert Pattinson‘s Chris Hansen as a man hollowed out by the camera he commands, and Hansen himself calls the whole thing fiction. The more revealing face in Lance Oppenheim’s film belongs to someone audiences first met as a child: Jonathan Lipnicki, the boy from Jerry Maguire and Stuart Little, cast as one of the men the host’s show was built to catch.

It would be easy to file that under shock casting, and Oppenheim knew it. The choice is closer to an argument about form. A film about a television franchise that fed on public exposure borrows the one thing a screenplay cannot write from scratch, an actor’s history on screen, and lets the audience’s own memory do the rest.

Primetime, released by A24, dramatizes the darkest stretch of Hansen’s run on To Catch a Predator, the NBC sting franchise built with the civilian watchdog group Perverted Justice. First-time screenwriter Ajon Singh adapted it loosely from Luke Dittrich’s Esquire article, with Pattinson as Hansen, Merritt Wever as his producer and Skyler Gisondo as Dan, a young decoy. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lipnicki plays a man known only by his screen name, Crazyfrog73, caught in the kitchen of the sting house while hoping to meet the boy Gisondo is playing; the scene involves full-frontal nudity and a can of whipped cream.

Oppenheim has been explicit about why. At the Venice press conference he said he cast Lipnicki and Gisondo because of their history as child actors, “to take the baggage that they brought to movies before and figure out new ways for them to shed the skin of who they were in different films.” He told THR that Jerry Maguire was a reference during pre-production, and that after screening it for his crew he kept wondering where Lipnicki was now. The actor’s name had sat in his phone notes for years. When the part was offered, Lipnicki recalls, the director called to tell him: “I don’t want it to seem stunt-casty.”

What makes the casting cut is the actor’s own arc, which runs in the opposite direction to the man at the film’s center. Lipnicki told THR he left Los Angeles, got rid of everything he owned and drove around the country in his Jeep Wrangler, his “Eat, Pray, Love moment,” before landing in Oklahoma, where he now teaches acting and produces. He remembers Stuart Little junkets where journalists asked a child whether he was going to do drugs, and a youth spent under “a lot of pressure not to become a train wreck.” Taking this role, he says, was part of deciding he would no longer concern himself with what people think.

Set that beside the reading the critics share. Variety’s Venice review describes an “arrogant, fame-addicted” Hansen who mistakes “the adulation of the TV-watching public for actual moral rectitude”; Wired’s essay on the film’s ego-driven core notes that the film’s Hansen seems desperate for accolades and complains that the show never won an Emmy. The engine of that man is the opinion of others. Lipnicki’s stated freedom is the refusal of it. The actor who walked away from the gaze is placed inside the house built to feed it, and the ego the reviews describe stops being one host’s pathology and starts to look like the appetite of the audience.

Lipnicki himself declines to over-read it. Asked whether casting former child stars in a To Catch a Predator film says something about how Hollywood treats children, he told THR there are “a lot of ways to look at it,” and called the film “a commentary on certain elements of that world.” It is the right restraint. Oppenheim, a documentarian making his first narrative feature after Some Kind of Heaven and Ren Faire, uses an actor’s real biography the way nonfiction uses a subject: as material that arrives already charged.

The same move is where Primetime is most exposed. MovieWeb notes that nobody on the real show ever put whipped cream on themselves, and Films Fatale, setting the scene beside the sting it draws on, lists how far it departs from what was broadcast, which makes the film’s most-discussed image an invention. Hansen, who watched it in a crowded Times Square theater, told viewers to go in knowing that it is “absolutely a fictional portrayal of me, of my colleagues, of the series,” and, asked by Jesse Watters, gave Pattinson’s performance a D. Roger Moore at Movie Nation gives the film two stars and argues that its fact-bending “leaves the victims out of the equation.” If Oppenheim’s argument lives in the fiction, so does the case against him.

Primetime premiered in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 5 and opened in US theaters through A24 on September 25, two days after reaching France and Germany. Lipnicki, 35, is also producing his own slate, including Williston, due in November.

He is still best known for telling Tom Cruise that a human head weighs eight pounds. Primetime stakes its most uncomfortable scene on that memory: the audience walks into Hansen’s kitchen expecting the kid, and finds the show’s real product waiting there instead.