Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Thu 13 Feb @ times vary

Alex Gibney / USA / 2013 / 124 mins

Many sporting figures have had blips on their career: Tiger Woods, O J Simpson, and Oscar Pistorius. But Lance Armstrong’s catastrophic descent is possibly the sporting world’s most embarrassing fall from grace. Alex Gibney’s revealing documentary tries to explain just what happened.

Jumping back and forth between interviews with Armstrong before and after his acknowledgment of using performance-enhancing drugs, Gibney charts the cyclist’s life from early manhood and his entrance into the sport, his period as the world’s most famous athlete who survived cancer and his eventual plummet into disgraced infamy. This is fleshed out by footage of his legendary races and interviews with former teammates and colleagues but these inputs are almost entirely negative.

Gibney began making the film in 2009 to coincide with Armstrong’s return to the Tour de France, but when the seven-time winner made public his deception, Gibney had to rethink the movie’s angle. The end product suffers from this interruption because although the film’s initial focus was Armstrong, after his admission, the story really became much bigger.

Despite the early inclusion of the Oprah confession, the film’s primary laudatory intentions disconcertingly seep into it, though this is balanced by the frank and vilifying input of past associates. These help to paint a true picture of the domineering, conceited and manipulative figure. Although Armstrong’s warts-and-all life story is a compelling yarn, it’s overshadowed by intrigue in the culture where he learned his misgivings and the institutions that harboured and/or ignored his (and others) behaviour. Gibney’s attempts to graft in segments about corruption in the sport aren’t really pursued with enough detail, making them feel half-hearted. This results in a lengthy and ill-fitting hybrid somewhere between admiring biopic and defamatory exposé.

What Gibney’s production alarmingly but understandably demonstrates is how people will ignore logical sense if it means they can believe in a hero. As Gibney himself puts it “A beautiful lie rather than the ugly truth.”