How much do we have our reality packaged for us — and how dangerous could that be? A new documentary from Netflix this month tells the tale of “Kai,” later identified as Caleb McGillvary, who went from obscurity to viral hero almost literally overnight. That ascent got fueled by a very selective look at Kai, and the reality industry ended up getting humiliated when “Kai” turned out to be something very different — and even his heroism may have been something else entirely.

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker turns into a morality play, but in truth one has to wonder how the fantasy of Kai the Hero ever got as far as it did. Even Netflix’ official description on this trailer becomes part of the problem:

This shocking documentary chronicles a happy-go-lucky nomad’s ascent to viral stardom and the steep downward spiral that resulted in his imprisonment.

This makes it sound as though sudden fame ruined a heroic and “happy-go-lucky” nomad’s charmed life. To be fair, the documentary eventually disabuses viewers of this notion, but that is the actual key to the real moral of the story — valuing the viral over the comprehensive and objective blinds us, perhaps more now than ever.

In the beginning, that is how the world saw Kai in February 2013 — a happy-go-lucky nomad caught in a moment of heroism, someone who rejected materialism and only wanted to be free. He just happened to be carrying a hatchet when the driver that gave him a ride tried killing road workers with his car, and then got out and started attacking onlookers. Kai hit him several times in the head with the hatchet to stop the driver, who survived and got sentenced to several years in prison. The first video report went viral, and the story of the homeless hero went everywhere almost literally overnight. (Even we briefly noted the story at the time.)

Warning: mild spoilers ahead.

As The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker makes clear, though, the world saw Kai that way because that’s how the story got packaged almost from the beginning. Everyone wanted a piece of Kai — the local reporter who first broke the story perhaps least of all, but still interested in the narrative. Reality TV producers chased after him. Late-night TV hosts wanted to cheer Kai in front of their live audiences. Media outlets around the world clamored to promote Kai as a folk hero. An avalanche of “smash smash SMASH” memes rolled over social media.

What The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker truly demonstrates is the power and danger of narrative journalism. Signs abounded from the start that Kai might be mentally disturbed, even at the moment of his heroism, as the original reporter concedes. No one wanted to rock the boat, though, because everyone wanted to go along for the ride — a ride that came to a sudden and tragic halt three months later, when McGillvary murdered an elderly lawyer. Only then did “Kai’s” past come out, and all of the red flags become too apparent to ignore any longer. Netflix’ documentary digs into that past, and into the alleged abuse and neglect (and denial) of McGillvary’s childhood and adolescence.

Even the original heroic act may have been very different from how it was portrayed in the media. McGillvary later claimed to have given the driver some spiked weed, and might have goaded the driver into running his car into the workers by feeding the driver’s messianic delusion at that moment. No one seemed to question at the time why a transient like McGillvary had a hatchet handy at that moment, or what else he might have done with it, either. All throughout the ascent into viral stardom, McGillvary exhibited all sorts of bizarre behavior that should have alerted everyone around him of mental health issues at the very least, and yet few if any did anything about it. One gets the impression that it would have disturbed the narrative — and that the narrative was more important.

Could intervention have saved the life of McGillvary’s victim? That’s impossible to say, but indulging McGillvary’s madness to exploit his fame certainly didn’t. And one has to ask whether “Kai’s” celebrity allowed his madness to fester even more and give him more of a sense of impunity than he might otherwise have had.

End of spoilers.

To its credit, Netflix raises all of these questions by the end of The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker, but it takes a while to get there. The first half of the film almost feels like a celebration of “Kai,” which may be a deliberate choice to make the eventual gut-punch of reality more potent. If so, though, isn’t that a narrative choice? And is that not also manipulative?

In the end, we are left with one clear lesson: don’t trust the media narrative. And additionally, things that look too good to be true usually aren’t. That may be too easy, though; the real lesson may actually be that our thirst for viral, feel-good, perspective-validating stories feeds the narrative-journalism and reality-TV machine. It certainly did with “Kai,” and with that its tragic and deadly denouement.

That makes this documentary worth watching. It’s a depressing story, though, even though compelling and ultimately necessary. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you enjoy well-made true-crime documentaries, The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker will be right up your alley. But even then, expect to keep having nagging questions about the veracity of that genre, and even this film at times.

Using the Hot Air scale for films already on home theater platforms, The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker gets a 3:

• 4 – Buy the film/subscribe to the service
• 3 – Worth a rental price or pay-per-view
• 2 – Wait for it to come on a TV channel you already get
• 1 – Avoid at all costs

Netflix released the film on January 10, so it has been available less than two weeks. It does not have an MPAA rating as it never appeared in theaters, but Netflix assigned it a TV-MA certificate for violence, profanity, alcohol/tobacco use, and intensity. I would certainly not air this for children and adolescents, but it might be a useful discussion tool for older teens to discuss media manipulation and the pitfalls of virality and social media.