If your knowledge of US cinema post-'84 is predicated on names like Slackers, Stranger Than Paradise, She's Gotta Have It, Go Fish and Crumb, then Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes should be required homework. Jon Pierson specialises in spotting fledgling talent, raising capital, and brokering distribution; his fingerprints are all over those and plenty more besides. His book, though, is far from self-laudatory, even if the man possessed with eye enough to buy into the groundfloor on Spike (Lee), Mike (Moore), Richard Linklater, Errol Morris and Jim Jarmusch has much to crow about. Variety calls him "the guru of independent film."

Conversational and anecdotal, Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes is unexpectedly enthralling. A lot inevitably revolves around money, his message seemingly that non-studio movies are sold not so much on genius and imagination as the ability to beat your drum louder than the next man. It all bottom-lines to the dollar, yes, but the picture his book paints is one of a man who, even after a decade, can still successfully reconcile the fiscal with the artistically accomplished. There is only one real mistake - ego-maniacal Rob Weiss: "everything you don't want to be as a first-time film-maker" - and even then Pierson realises it as a suitably cautionary tale. The book certainly retains a healthy scepticism where wonderkind Querentino is concerned.

Most surprising of all, it's the documentarists who stand out, Pierson's name having been attached, either by serendipity or design, to arguably the two key non-fiction features of recent times: policer The Thin Blue Line and the dazzling agit-prop of Roger & Me. He tells us again and again that, unfortunately, the sell is to convince audiences these are not documentaries, considering Morris' Blue Line ad campaign a personal favourite because it "conceals the fact" that it's anything but fiction. Not that it helped box-office or a contradictory bid for a Best Documentary Oscar.

Similar generosity on the part of the Academy greeted the brilliant Michael Moore picture, but, in his most captivating chapter, Pierson explains how they managed to sell this Left-leaning documentary to the gigantic Warners for $3 million, attach special conditions to purchase (buying homes for people shown; clauses preventing South African and Israeli releases), and how the garrulous Moore tirelessly toured it around the globe for months on end.

For anyone seriously interested in American indie after Soderbergh, this book is punctuated with fascinating detail: a series of conversations with Kevin Clerks Smith about what it's like to be at the sharp-end; a chapter that effectively rips the guts out the tiresome hyping of low-no-budgets (no releasable feature, Pierson explains, could come in at under $150,000); and, perhaps most importantly of all, about film-makers' own inflated sense of self-worth.

Talent will out maybe, but talent is never enough on its own seems to be Pierson's conclusion. As both a surprisingly readable tale and salutary lesson, this self-styled "guided tour across a decade of independent American Cinema" comes highly recommended.