White Noise opens with an awkward Halloween party attended by a collection of alt-right personalities, hosted by Lucian Wintrichbest known for his brief stint as a White House correspondent for the far-right blog Gateway Punditin Washington, D.C. Theres a knock at the door; Wintrich hops up from the couch, brimming with excitement as Lauren Southern, the renowned Canadian anti-immigration activist, makes an appearance. The two embrace. Southern is wearing a black cape, pale makeup, and cheesy plastic vampire teeth. Im the IRS, she quips.

Its an oddly human moment for a group of characters that are almost exclusively portrayed as a sinister monolith: The superabundance of documentaries, investigative articles, books and internet shorts on the alt-right that have materialized in the years since Donald Trumps rise to power are, as a general rule, sensationalist and partisan affairs. Conventional treatments of the coalition of activists, commentators, writers and internet personalities tend to paint the predominantly internet-based movement as an ominous cult of evil with enormousand ever-increasinginfluence in the American political arena.

But White Noise takes a different approach. The new documentary features 27-year-old Atlantic filmmaker Daniel Lombroso following a handful of the alt-rights most notorious figures for the better part of four years, providing an intimate portrait of a collection of lost, desperately unhappy young menand, to a lesser extent, womensearching for meaning in a fringe ideology. While most of the mainstream coverage of the alt-right spends little, if any, actual time with its adherentsprevious documentaries like Age of Rage give the significant majority of airtime to anti-fascist activists and Southern Poverty Law Center intellectualsLombroso seeks to understand the alt-right as it is; made up of real people rather than a faceless force of darkness.

Viewers gain not just a richer understanding of the profound ugliness of the movements devotes but also of the conditions responsible for producing such ugliness: a sense of loneliness in an age of interconnected mass culture, and a yearning for community in an increasingly atomistic world. Acolytes of the alt-right are often portrayed as larger-than-life supervillains; White Noise reveals them to be broken, deeply isolated individuals.

Besides Lauren Southern, Pizzagate promulgator Mike Cernovich and white supremacist Richard Spencer are the main subjects of the documentary, although other major figures make tangential appearances. The three prominent personalities each represent a different subgenre of the alt-right: Spencer stands in for the dyed-in-the-wool white nationalists, Cernovich for the Trumpist conspiracy theorists, and Southern the hard-right grifters. All three have taken on outsize roles in our political discourse; but in Lombrosos documentary they become more visibly human.

What is notable about the film, then,is less its explosively disturbing momentsthe Nazi salutes in Washington, D.C., on the heels of Trumps victory, the deadly chaos of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesvillebut rather the dreary routine of the piteous lives lived in the empty spaces in between them.

In White Noise, Spencer is not the leader of a neo-fascist insurgency on the brink of conquering America, but a divorced outcast who, at the age of 42, has moved back in with his mother. One sees Spencer lurching from one failure to another, a man perpetually frustrated by his inability to be loved by a world that has rejected him. For every Charlottesville, there are 100 speeches given to mostly empty rooms, events canceled at the last minute by venues horrified by Spencers ideology, and profanity-laden public humiliations at the hands of strangers.

2018 has been one of the hardest years of my life, he tells Lombroso. Ive had a failed marriage, multiple lawsuits, I cant raise money the way that I had been, Im being treated like a terrorist. Ive never been put through this s**t. And its just awful.

Spencers desperation is a consistent fact of life for the documentarys cast of characters. Cernovich, also divorced, is revealed to be living off of his ex-wifes paycheck. (Its pretty alpha, he argues, to get paid alimony by a woman.) Like Spencer, Cernovich has been made out to be a cunning political savant by mainstream commentatorsdescribed as someone to reckon with whose influence reach[es] the highest seats of power by the SPLCbut he leads something of a dismal, bleak existence: Im not someone who likes myself particularly much, he confesses at one point. Im not somebody who wakes up and thinks, I really like me. I really like this person.

Southern, for her part, seems to be increasingly uncomfortable with the ideology she publicly promotes as the film wears on, visibly cringing when her then-boyfriend informs her that his primary motivation for raising a family is the fact that us Europeans, we have responsibility to reproduce, and awkwardly dodging alt-right provocateur Gavin Mcinness drunk sexual advances. (Southern was 23 at the time; Mcinnes was 48, and married with three children).

In this way, the documentary is about more than the alt-right; its an examination of the ugly underbelly of our technological age. Its characters are, after all, all creatures of the internet, and their followers are disproportionately composed of isolated young people searching for a sense of belonging in an online ecosystem of forums, YouTube channels and message boards. As an especially disturbing phenomenon, the alt-right is unique; but as a manifestation of the widespread inclination to find purpose in a political community, its merely one particularly vile manifestation of a universally felt impulse.

Above all else, White Noise is a sort of unsympathetic eulogy for a dying movement; a portrait of a cohort whose brief moment is decidedly over. Over the four-year span of the film, we see its peak as well as its sorry declinewhile watching its proponents attempt to reconcile themselves to a country far less receptive to their ambitions than they had once hoped.

Nate Hochman (@njhochman) is an ISI summer fellow for The Dispatch.

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The Alt-Right's Last Gasps - The Dispatch