On the eve of his 23rd birthday, eight years ago, Adrian Grenier, the future star of “Entourage,” set about making a documentary about fathers. Mr. Grenier had grown up in New York, the child of a single mother who had Ali MacGraw looks and flower-child ways. The man with whom he shared his DNA was either someone named John, in Ohio, or a man his mother was about to marry, a guy she had known for more than two decades.
Inspired to learn about his own father but curious too to find out just what Americans think about dads in general, Mr. Grenier begins “Shot in the Dark,” the resulting film, by heading out to parking lots and Yankee Stadium to ask them. A father, one man tells him, “is supposed to be a leader; a father should be a leader, someone that people would want to follow.”
“Shot in the Dark,” to be shown on Sunday on HBO, is about as tepid as that reply. Sometimes Mr. Grenier just lets the camera linger on his face, as he stares out searchingly from behind his aviator-style sunglasses. Early on the camera inexplicably points itself at a vast gray sky. Mr. Grenier doesn’t quite know what to do with himself or where to go next, but he assumes that everyone he encounters must have some vested interest in his story and quest.
“I’m going to find my father right now,” he tells two strangers on the street. “What do you think about me doing that?”
At that point Mr. Grenier has decided to go visit John in Ohio, presuming that he is in all likelihood his biological father, but before he goes off on his road trip, he approaches a psychic about the outcome. “I think whatever happens,” she says, “it will break your heart.”
Mr. Grenier cries at one point. He asks small children what they think about his father’s abandonment of him. (They think it’s “bad.”) His self-absorption colors his whole enterprise. He puts himself in nearly every frame, giving insufficient time to some of the less censured, less contained characters around him — his mother, Karesse, and a friend of hers, Mr. Grenier’s surrogate father, Boris, a guy with the table manners of a feudal serf and the look of an aging bookie. Mr. Grenier might have done well to spend 20 of the documentary’s 85 minutes just with him.
But Mr. Grenier heads off for Ohio with a friend. He finds John, who actually is his father. They talk. They drink beer. “It’s a little disappointing, John,” Mr. Grenier’s friend says, “because it turns out you’re a nice guy, and like, you know, we kind of wanted to find this, like, neglecting father.” A mere flat tire would have helped to spice things up.
