The South By Southwest Film Festival is widely considered to be one of the top showcases for documentary film in North America, and if we're to take the 2007 lineup as an indicator of general trends, then there is currently no hotter nonfiction genre than the election movie. The Festival (which began last Friday and runs concurrently with the famed SXSW Music Conference through March 18) is screening at least five feature films focused on elections. An inordinate amount of attention has already been bestowed on just one of SXSW 2007's election films, the Michael Moore expose Manufacturing Dissent. But while that production by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine offers an undeniably alluring behind-the-scenes peek at the documentary world's biggest blowhard, another SXSW election doc has managed to embroil pop culture notables as disparate as Alec Baldwin and Jello Biafra in a massive smear against the most powerful man in California.

That film is Running With Arnold, directed by former entertainment reporter Dan Cox. The doc tracks Arnold Schwarzenegger's wild ride from Austrian yokel to world-class bodybuilder--and then from action superstar to titan of Sacramento. The film is comprised of old interviews with Arnold, new interviews with Arnold's detractors, clips from Arnold's movies, and footage shot during the whirlwind recall election that first put him in office. It's an extremely entertaining piece of propaganda, one which seems content to settle for knowing laughs from the choir in lieu of offering the kind of hard analysis that might actually convert skeptics.

Cox identifies Schwarzenegger's Achilles heel early on, with a clip from an ancient archival interview in which the young bodybuilder describes his unquenchable thirst for attention. As Cox tells it, a defining moment came while Schwarzenegger was serving in the Austrian military. He went AWOL in order to enter a bodybuilding competition, and when he returned to his unit, he was promptly thrown in jail. Not for the first time, the future Governator chose physical vanity and personal stardom over national duty. No doubt this is a dubious personality trait, and an embarrassing anecdote. But like most of the revelations in Running With Arnold, it's hardly the kind of thing that will make a dent in Schwarzenegger's career.