(Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection)

If you put aside the deep knowledge Finding Vivian Maier imparts about an undeniably powerful contributor to photography, and the stark sense of the wildly eccentric character behind the images, you are left with one of the funniest, saddest, most insightful, and even shocking films in years. There isn’t an emotion you won’t feel, and you feel them all while learning about a photographic talent who happens to be about as eccentric as any 19th-century French painter you can name. It’s hard to imagine a more entertaining film.

Rarely does a film, narrative fiction or otherwise, leave an audience cackling with laughter before shocking them with darkness and then steering back toward melancholy, all seamlessly. It also works as a biopic of a prolific, compulsive, effortlessly talented, and fiercely independent artist.

Before director and writer John Maloof purchased Maier’s enormous stash of negatives at an auction for a couple hundred dollars, no one had seen her images, and there are well over 100,000 of them. Her closest friends, who were really people who employed her as a nanny for varying periods of time, knew she compulsively photographed everything around her, but never imagined how talented she was, and, of course, she never shared her work with them.

The early parts of the film chronicle Maloof’s process of tracking down whatever information he could find about Maier, and it becomes obvious that they are in a way kindred spirits across time. The commitment, resourcefulness, and borderline obsession he musters in his detective work are astounding, and there’s a sense of fate at play in how she would have remained lost to history without a person with Maloof’s exact qualities. There’s a real sense of fun as he digs and digs, finding one odd thing after the next.

Maier had an uncanny knack for uncovering an endless stream of moments that capture a casual, immediate, yet authentically meaningful impression of humanity in all its varieties. In many of her photographs, it’s almost as if her subjects, random people on the Chicago streets, posed for her, baring their souls for an instant. She, by all accounts, had no intimacy in her life, but she could draw out and catch expressions and sensations of complete honesty and tenderness photographing thousands of strangers on the street. The film portrays her as being almost autistic in her lack of disregard of social cues and fixation on details.

Since she never attempted to profit from her art, and she made ends meet as a live-in nanny in the 1950s-1980s, she shot much of her photography with the children in tow. She dragged them throughout the Chicago slums, probably using them to disarm her subjects, so that she wasn’t just a lone nut jamming a camera in her subjects’ faces.

The film consists mainly of Maloof’s interviews of the children she cared for, and they pull no punches in their recollections. It’s jolting that such an eccentric character was so close with so many children, but perhaps this is part of her genius, that her employers implicitly trusted her with what they most loved. The film makes it clear this was maybe not such a great idea (would you trust someone as unstable as van Gogh to care for your kids?), though the children she cared for, now all grown, have a uniqueness and zest for life. A story is recounted where Maier intentionally ran away from the children she had taken out on a city excursion just to teach them a lesson, as the adult being interviewed now believes.

Part art history lesson, part intimate biopic, part true life mystery, and equal parts funny, tragic, and inspiring, Finding Vivian Maier has just about everything you could want from a film.