Freelance critic Jake Browne in Rolling Papers (Alchemy)

On January 1, 2014, Colorado became the first state in the nation to make recreational marijuana sales the law of the land. No longer were people required to go through the motions of obtaining bogus prescriptions for medicinal marijuana. Now, healthy people can just walk into a store and buy pot simply because they want to get high.

Rolling Papers documents the story of selling weed for recreational purposes in the Rocky Mountain state. More accurately, it follows the local newspaper, The Denver Post, covering the story as it unfolds. The paper created a special editorial department to cover all the latest marijuana happenings, branding it the Cannabist, with an emphasis on digital content.

From the start, it becomes clear that there is more than a bit of industry romanticism going on, with much of the doc coming across as a commercial for the continuing relevance of local print journalism in an era accustomed to having instant, free access to all the world’s knowledge, entertainment, and news coverage literally at its fingertips.

There are interesting angles to explore in the fledgling recreational pot realm, such as the fact that marijuana companies can’t deposit their vast sums of cash into banks and so have to hire heavily armed associates to protect their fortunes. Also, massive taxes on recreational pot have made it impossible for businesses to thrive on pot sales alone. Medicinal sales, because of their comparatively lower taxes, make up the bulk of sales.

These issues aren’t what the Cannabist covers. It focuses more on detailing the inventory of local weed merchants, including the exotic, potent varieties, such as “Shatter.” The varying flavors and strains are subjected to exhaustively discriminating discernment by pot geeks.

Journalism can, of course, be a compelling process to watch unfold, though contemporary journalism is perhaps less well suited to cinematic depiction than the analog, typewriter clickety-clacking, phone book-combing, chain-smoking, pavement-pounding type shown in riveting fashion in All the President’s Men and others films. Watching a guy use his smartphone is indistinguishable from what everyone does all the time.

The overall structure is a bit disorienting, with sporadic, seemingly random jumps from freelance writer to freelance photographer, mixing in slices of life about them, including some of their editorial and writing processes. There isn’t much of a logical flow from scene to scene. It has to be said that it is edited and laid out in such a way as to suggest marijuana usage by the filmmakers, or perhaps to provoke in viewers the disorienting randomness of actually smoking pot.

I’m also reminded of advice I was given by more veteran smokers upon first smoking weed—the proper way to treat marijuana is as part of the scenery, not something to be talked about while smoking. Discuss more interesting things when you are blazing—it makes debating and learning about all the cool stuff in science and history even more compelling. So in comparison, a documentary about people writing about weed actually turns out to be pretty tepid.