Borchardt's dream is film. It claims his spare cash, time left over from delivering newspapers or cleaning up at a local cemetery. His kids get a sleepover in the cutting room so he can keep working; chasing the dream. (He even shows them Apocalypse Now on the grounds that it's never too early; ‘The horror, the horror,’ giggles his young son.)

Borchardt's dream is Northwestern, a semi-autobiographical monochrome rust-bucket tale of drink and failure in his home State. ‘It's barren trees and empty roads,’ he says, ‘but there’s a warmth in the soul.’ He even started it - with himself as putative star - but the money ran out before his enthusiasm. So when we join him, although Smith's film is subtitled ‘The Making of Northwestern,’ we actually follow Borchardt as he decides to return to an unfinished horror called Coven (it rhymes with ‘cloven’ he demands, not ‘oven’). Shift three thousand cassettes, he insists, and Northwestern is back in business.

He's not without support either, although not from his brothers who insist Mark'd be better off with a regular job. His mother, when she's not being roped in, tolerates her son's obsessions. Elsewhere, though, people actually want to work with the fledgling auteur; self-belief is contagious. Not least his closest bud, the sloth-like acid casualty Mike Schank, Borchardt's right-hand man and composer of choice, with his grab-bag of drug anecdotes recited with a clear-eyed monotone mania. They make for a formidable double act.

For money Borchardt taps up his Uncle Bill, a decrepit trailer-park resident reluctantly press-ganged into becoming Coven’s de facto Executive Producer. As the film progresses we see more and more of Mark's affection for the old man even as he deteriorates before our very eyes. He makes it to the premiere but gives out soon after, leaving an astonishing quarter of a million dollars in the bank.

Of course, as the star of American Movie, Borchardt is attracting attention the like of which he could never have imagined before Smith happened along. Which means that, low-rent or not, Coven is going to be seen. (It's included on the US DVD of Smith's picture, and it’s actually not bad.) So that, whatever you might think of Mark Borchardt, however much we might raise a giggle at Mark Borchardt - and American Movie is frequently hilarious - it doesn't take a genius to guess just who here is getting the last laugh.