A good documentary needs to tell a story.  It's not enough to just present a lot of facts and pictures to go with them--that's the kind of programming that I fall asleep to on the History Channel.  That kind of documentary is only ever going to appeal to someone who's already interested in learning more about the subject.  What if you have a subject like the fashion industry and Vogue magazine, and a viewer like me?  How do you draw me into that world when I already think fashion is a near complete waste of time?

The answer is that you set up a story with heroes and villains and you frame the narrative in a way that there is a beginning and ending and you let the events play out.  The September Issue does just that by painting a picture of the editor of Vogue as this kind of steely, humorless woman who is apt to be dismissive of anyone, regardless of name or rank.  While her story is what drives the movie forward, she's really the villain in her own movie.  The hero, as it turns out, is one of her section editors who is on the front lines trying to produce the content that makes the magazine successful.  It's a classic story of creative types, where the creative person does all of this work (with a team, in this case) and pours heart and soul into it, only to have the cold editorial hand of authority dismiss it with a simple gesture or grunt.

If you've ever sat in a creative writing class, you'll know what this is like.  A writer can spend as many hours as she wants on a poem, that won't necessarily make it good or worthy of inclusion in the literary magazine.  That's a hard slap of reality, and it's one that many creative people tend to chalk up to differences of taste rather than objective concerns about quality.  In truth, there's probably some of both going on whenever an editor draws out the red pen, and that struggle is what makes the audience root for the worker bees and boo at the boss lady in this film.

There are a lot of other places that the film could have gone--I would have been interested in seeing how much of the content of the magazine is dwarfed by the advertising and the struggle that creates for the creative types.  I would have liked more interaction with the peripheral characters who weren't so enamored with fashion and who were as dismissive of the whole enterprise as the lead was of some of the specific work.   But that might have taken away from the film's very clear narrative throughline.  For a movie about a fashion magazine, it did a good job of hooking me in, so that's all that I could really ask.