It would be perfectly acceptable to reach the end of this movie and ask, "Did I just watch one long commercial?" The startling climax of this movie — and I'm sorry if you were planning on seeing this, but the two hours of sleep you could have instead might prove more beneficial than watching this movie — is that five unpublished books by the perplexing "Catcher in the Rye" author, J.D. Salinger, will be released between 2015 and 2020. Beneath the marketing stench is a googly-eyed idolatry of the life belonging to one of the most unique literary voices of the mid-20th century. But the film favors a large scope of anecdotal myth-making over an in-depth look at Salinger’s humanity or his calculated and crafted prose that resonated so powerfully with the public.

DOCUMENTARY BASED ON SPECULATION

Instead of research and touching conversation with those closest to Salinger, the documentary goes for gossip and speculation. From over 100 interviews belonging primarily to film and writing world icons, these talking heads come across more as director Shane Salerno showboating rather than providing substance on the subject. Instead of a probing character study, Salinger is propped up like a cardboard cutout as a tortured genius plagued by lost love and the horrors of war.

But this overblown, should-have-been-made-for-A&E documentary does have its merits. Sprinkled among the celebrity name-drops are friends and old lovers of Salinger as well as a few of his biographers providing some of the most detailed tangents the film has. But so convoluted and unconnected are these stories that the speakers come across as vapid and self-indulgent caricatures rather than intimates of the writer. There is use of great archival footage and historical pictures — very little of which explicitly relate to Salinger — to add a level of texture to the piece. But you can only repeat images so much, so Salerno compensates through stock footage and tawdry reenactments from a Salinger look-alike agonizing over a typewriter on the stage of a theater. The latter scenes become a crutch, most noticeable when used exclusively as the means to visually communicate the pivotal moment of "Catcher in the Rye's" publication.

"SENSATIONALIZED AND NEGLIGENT"

Also, there are a handful of interesting stories like how he once married a Nazi, how he was obsessed with being published in “The New Yorker,” used his privacy as a PR tool, his predilection for young women and how he preferred his fictional characters to his family. But after the two hours are up, the next realization is how much work it will take to remove the hearsay from the facts. In spite of its faults, "Salinger" will sure to be a hit with obsessed fans and lazy high school teachers everywhere.

The biggest atrocity of the documentary is not found in the sensationalized and negligent craftsmanship of the film, but instead in the hypocrisy. Here is a man who valued privacy and meticulously detailed writing while hating clichés and concessions, yet here is a movie exposing the man's life through such sentimental awe and banal reverence that it would almost be satirical if it wasn’t so sincere. Perhaps the most telling red flag is that neither his two children nor widowed wife provide any fresh interviews for the film.

This a product of a ten-year obsession by Shane Salerno — who happens to be writing a biography of Salinger, as the credits conveniently promoted — that seems to be blinded by fandom or attempts to be so exhaustive in its reach that it is exhausting. So when Coldplay's "Strawberry Swings" comes in to close out the movie, it feels so out of place and so disingenuous that you can't help but feel that the entire movie is, well, a phony.