This fascinating documentary centers on eight men and women who spent two years living and working side by side in a multistory terrarium in the Arizona desert, largely isolated from the outside world. We first meet them at a 1991 press conference as they are about to seal themselves inside the Biosphere 2, which is meant to test whether human beings could survive in an artificially sealed environment on, say, another planet. (As someone explains, Earth is Biosphere 1.)

Then director Matt Wolf peels back layers, flashing back 25 years to the eight trailblazers as young hippies living in San Francisco, where they were recruited by John Allen, a charismatic iconoclast interested in the transformative potential of mankind. He organized them into a performing troupe, the Theatre of All Possibilities, which mounted experimental plays and eventually relocated to a ranch in rural New Mexico.

The members’ onstage performances feature garish costumes and an intensity approaching religious fervor, but the film refrains from outright comparing them to a cult. There is, however, deliciously shady business going on in the background: despite how avant-garde he may have appeared from the outside, Allen turns out to be financed entirely through old money, specifically, Ed Bass, a scion of one of America’s wealthiest families.

The backing Allen received had strings attached: he had to turn a profit, and so the troupe members were also entrepreneurs undertaking all kinds of ventures, many of them in industries they had little experience in. Yet Wolf doesn’t portray his subjects as bumblers. On the contrary, he seems to admire that they succeed despite a lack of practical knowledge. For example, a young architectural student managed to design and lead the building of an ocean-worthy vessel. As for the idea of constructing a biosphere, it grew out of a conference on climate change that the group hosted.

With all of the money Allen and his recruits had, they hired a topline public relations firm whose strategies would not seem so out of place today, such as hiring a big-name celebrity to endorse Biosphere 2. (In this case, it was then-TV star Rue McClanahan, who seems a bit confused about the project during an off camera moment.) Taking advantage of the public’s interest, the mainstream media covers the biosphere from all angles—one puff piece features a reporter interviewing the group’s costume designer about their distinct red uniforms.

Much of the second half consists of footage from inside the terrarium, where there is constant tension between whether real science is actually going on versus some kind of science-based entertainment. On the one hand, there are all kinds of lab experiments occurring, and no shortage of money is spent on the facilities—a simulated rain forest is especially impressive—but the biosphere is also designed so the public could buy tickets and watch the inhabitants at work, like zoo animals. Also, in a development that seems highly predictable today, the biospherians attain celebrity status, and the media reports on every bit of potentially salacious news involving them, which is something neither they or Allen are prepared for.

Wolf most recently directed Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, about an activist who simultaneously recorded news footage from several television networks every day for decades. Like that film, Spaceship Earth explores objectivity in the media; once doubts emerge about how truthfully the Biosphere 2 team has been representing themselves, the tone of the coverage shifts. The film paints the slow dissolution of the relationship between Allen and the press as resulting from the former’s tendency to avoid transparency. However, we also see small issues blown out of proportion.

There was definitely tension within the biosphere team as well, but Wolf does a better job of chronicling the most pivotal moments in the project’s history than achieving nuanced profiles of the different protagonists. We also don’t get much insight into team interplay: one participant seriously breaches protocol, but we never see the others’ reactions. The exception might be the widespread loathing of the team physician, who used the situation to forward his own experiments regarding caloric intake—with his housemates serving as unwitting guinea pigs.

The film takes on tragic overtones by the end, with the suggestion that the Biosphere 2 was so ahead of its time that no one knew what to make of the data gleaned or its true value. Wolf, for his part, pays the ultimate compliment by suggesting it has a legacy and mapping it out into the present day. Time will tell if there will ever be a Biosphere 3, but the film reminds us of the power of big, bold ideas.