WHAT TO SEE AT DOC NYC

Mole Man by Guy Fiorita, meanwhile, features as its hero the Outsider architect Ron Heist, who built a 50-room structure of scrap materials on land behind his parents’ home in eastern Pennsylvania.

The voluble Ron, 62, is autistic, from a generation that was never officially diagnosed. He has an uncanny talent for construction. His abode, which feels like the insides of an endless Arte Povera snake, was built without the use of a level or any other technical instruments. Ron scavenged most of the materials from abandoned towns and steel mills in the region around Pittsburgh, which emptied when industry declined there. When we meet him, he is living with his ageing mother. Family members summon local psychologists to plan the future of a creative spirit who seems incapable of surviving alone.

Ron’s project keeps expanding, as he collects, classifies and displays objects from a deserted cluster of homes in the woods. His endless galleries of ephemera are an Outsider art museum, although no one in his family sees a market for that kind of attraction and there is talk of transferring Ron to an institution that is not of his own creation.

Mole Man examines the interplay between autism and creativity. Ron, with idiosyncracies and an eagerness to talk about them, is an ardent archivist of work that loved ones and caregivers consider odd but not necessarily important.

The film also scrutinises the notion of art as therapy, although here well-meaning therapists consider placing an indefatigable builder of his own environment in the hands of a social service agency that would risk ending his life’s great project. There is an impending sadness amid all the homespun humour.

-DAVID D’ARCY