Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported on the mounting preoccupation within Democratic circles about who will be at the top of the ticket in the next presidential election. With Joe Biden’s future uncertain, two names have emerged as potential candidates for as early as 2024 if Biden refrains from seeking a second term. One of them, logically enough, is the sitting vice president, though Kamala Harris’s rock-bottom approval ratings are acknowledged to be an issue. The other — quite bafflingly if you aren’t the kind of person who non-ironically posts Democratic Avenger memes or resides in one of a handful of gilded Beltway zip codes — is Transportation secretary and 2020 also-ran Pete Buttigieg, whose mere presence in such an article is itself an astonishing statement about the hollowness of centrist liberalism in 2021.

Nevertheless, it’s in this light that we must, regrettably, view the new film Mayor Pete: a documentary portrait of the former mayor of South Bend’s longshot 2020 campaign for the presidency from which we are clearly intended to infer Big Things ahead. Buttigieg, it seems, is going to be with us for some time, and while it’s difficult to disagree with the characterization offered by Matthew Zarenkiewicz in his review for the Baffler (“a bizarre and unsettling documentary no one asked for”), director Jesse Moss’s film does indeed offer the viewer real insight into the vision of politics Buttigieg can be expected to champion as a budding standard-bearer for the Democratic Party.

From its opening scene to its closing credits, Mayor Pete is essentially two things: a rather tortured attempt to portray a conventional centrist politician as a heterodox renegade; a movie about a politician seeking high office that is utterly devoid of politics. In introducing us to its eponymous hero, we learn courtesy of a few news clips that Buttigieg “did things” to “transform housing” in the city he once governed (more on that here); we learn that he raised the minimum wage for city employees, and that his tenure as mayor saw the conversion of an old factory into a business park. Even this, it turns out, is mostly adornment and mostly about introducing us to Pete himself — the candidate’s own personal mythology being the scaffold on which the whole of the documentary, just like the Buttigieg brand itself, ultimately rests.