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Blessed with impressive multi-year access to the Burning Man Festival, its participants and bureaucracy, but undone by indecisiveness in its structure, themes and purpose, Jehane Noujaim and Vikram Gandhi’s The Man Will Burn is an engaging puzzlement.
Over its rushed and disjointed four-hour running time, the HBO docuseries offers some sense of the community that Burning Man offers and cultivates, as well as its evolving infrastructure and internal political conflicts; some awareness of the inherent and overwhelming whiteness and privilege underlying the event; some insight into several tumultuous years in Burning Man’s history; and some interest in the challenges facing Burning Man as it looks to the future. But at nearly every turn, the series is overwhelmed by an excess of material and an insufficiency of clarity and rigor.
The Man Will Burn
The Bottom Line
