I love tales of pre-Giuliani New York City, be they real or imagined. Such a picture of moral decay and lawlessness is painted that you can’t help but be intrigued in the way any good story of street level grey can. That is why Diary of a Times Square Thief appealed to me, as well as the fact that it’s a documentary with some mystery. So many souls come to New York every year with big dreams and naïve ideals, how many get lost along the way, be it by their own demons or the ones that can be found down every dark alley? Unknown, but as Diary ponders: what if one of them left something behind?

The film starts with filmmaker Klaas Bense buying a person’s diary on eBay from one of the site’s “darker corners” as he describes. Bense leaves his home in the Netherlands and arrives in New York with a mission: find the mysterious writer of the diary, a man who came to Manhattan from a “provincial American town” to become a successful writer only to find himself a successful screw-up. All Bense has is a first name, John, and the name of the place John stayed at in the late 1980s, the Times Square Hotel on 42nd Street.

Piece by piece, Bense seems to learn a little bit more about John and his current, possible whereabouts, even consulting a psychic when meeting one incidentally. As much as Diary is John’s story though, it’s also an oral history of a bygone chapter of New York history and I can speak first hand to that having walked along the same stretch of 42nd Street when I was in New York just this past February. It’s interesting trying to put those two places together in your head, it’s like trying to imagine Superman’s Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham City as the same place.

As for what became of John, yes we do find out, and no, I’m not going to tell you about it. I’m kind of two minds about it myself, and while the resolution to the mystery was nice, there’s something about the enduring mystery of this hodgepodge work of prose and Polaroids that feels too much like an artefact to have much barring on the here and now. Still, it was a great hook for the story and a compelling tale it is with numerous facets and wormholes to explore. Plus, it’s a complete film. It has a beginning, middle and end and covers a lot of ground in such a short space of time. A brilliant work in and of itself.

Not quite there though was the preceding short Steel Homes, about surviving relatives that store their departed loved ones belongings at a self-storage company because, well because they really don’t want to part with them. This will appeal to the inner pack rat in you, if you can self-identify as such. I heard a few people in the crowd grumble about how, in their opinion, the film had no point, but I disagree. In its way, it was a kind of poem about the power we ascribe to objects even though they really have none and examining how we come to terms with accepting that it’s the memory, not the object that has true power. Documentary as poetry? Not bad.