American Documentary

Less brawny but just as tireless are the players in Jane M. Wagner’s Break the Game, an innovative film constructed from excerpts from a vast accumulation of livestream recordings on the gaming website Twitch. Our hero is Narcissa Wright, a onetime champion now facing onslaughts of online transphobia. Hoping to set a record on a popular new game, Narcissa becomes a recluse and then an anxious wreck.

What emerges is an internecine tug of war between body and mind, and between the urges to stand out and fit in. The film — Wagner’s first — is extremely multimedia, which is to say, extremely Tribeca. But more profoundly, the documentary probes the intriguing possibility of taking images meant for one space and repurposing them into a cogent beginning, middle and end. Put another way: Even without the pixelated bells and whistles, it’s excellent storytelling.

Natalia Winkelman, The New York Times