Melissa Robyn Glassman surrounded by letters in Dear Mr. Brody (Greenwich Entertainment)

This freewheeling documentary centers on Michael Brody Jr., the 21-year-old heir to a margarine fortune who, in 1970, announced he was giving away $25 million. The twist was that anyone could ask for a piece of it, which is exactly what happened as money-hungry Americans inundated him with phone calls and letters. There was so much of the latter, in fact, that tens of thousands of unopened correspondences ended up languishing in storage for decades.

Dear Mr. Brody revisits a pivotal time in Brody’s life, but it’s also about those letters, which were unearthed by Melissa Robyn Glassman, then an assistant for producer Edward R. Pressman, who first got ahold of them while attempting to make a biopic about Brody that fell apart in preproduction. Pressman (an executive producer of Dear Mr. Brody) says no one wanted the letters. However, for Glassman and director Keith Maitland, they’re an invaluable window into the world inhabited by the magnanimous millionaire.

Initially Brody comes across like the definitive image of a child of Sixties counterculture. In particular, there’s his oft-repeated mantra that he is giving away love, not money. Early scenes show how instant celebrity status soon came his way, including an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, his photograph on the front pages of countless newspapers, even a recording contract. (He played guitar and had a surprisingly nice singing voice.)

When Brody’s profile soars at its highest, that’s when the film starts delving into the letters, dramatizing them through the use of actors speaking directly at the camera. Although some of the letter-writers are looking for financial help to start a business, most need the money for medical bills, mortgage payments, and other necessities. These are people at their most desperate, yet it turns out their stories aren’t all sad, just as it becomes clear that Brody’s life wasn’t nearly so charmed.

The more letters Maitland and Glassman sift through, what becomes apparent is not all of the authors are begging for themselves. Some recommend that Brody donate money to certain charities, while others applaud the would-be young philanthropist, including one writer who encloses a personal check for Brody to include with what he’s giving away. Though Brody suffered mentally and emotionally because he felt his underlying message—that money cannot buy what’s really important in life—was getting lost amid the spectacle of free cash, this subset of letters proves some people really were listening.

Maitland’s previous credits include the documentary Tower (2016), which used colorful animation to pay homage to the psychedelic tone of the 1960s as well as blunt the impact of its own horrific subject matter: the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas, Austin. By comparison, Dear Mr. Brody has a more conventional approach, but the director still makes telling choices, such as dramatizing the letters, although there’s a little too much artifice at times. (In some of the re-creations, the author’s handwriting appears large in the background, which is unnecessary and distracting). Nevertheless, these scenes humanize those who reached out to Brody for help, which is something the television news media at the time didn’t really do—in interviews of Brody or those lined up outside of his Manhattan office, the reporters appear largely disdainful or focus on the most blatant of opportunists.

Brody’s wife, Renee, and others similarly set the record straight regarding the perception that Brody made his pledge while high on drugs, a story which the press at the time eagerly ran with. This is not to say his personal demons never ran amok. The tone becomes particularly intense during the second half of the film, in which so much of his disintegration happens on camera that it starts to feel uncomfortably voyeuristic.

Dear Mr. Brody closes on a somewhat somber note, lamenting how Brody, who got caught up in his own notoriety, lost sight of the very thing he preached as being so integral to living: love. He may have stirred up a lot of good will, but it ended up in envelopes he never got around to opening. Nevertheless, this film manages to be pretty lively and poignant despite doubling as a cautionary tale.