Reiner Holzemer’s film surveys the career of the American designer who built a half-a-billion-dollar luxury brand out of five reconceptualized gray suits.

In Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailors Dreams, German documentarian Reiner Holzemer, whose recent work has included films on the fashion houses of Dries Van Noten and Martin Margiela, tackles a designer with an instantly recognizable aesthetic but an aversion to introspection. That makes Browne a somewhat distant subject, an enigma, as one friend and colleague describes him. He prefers to keep the creative spark tucked away inside his head and let his garments speak for themselves.

Holzemer seems aware of the potential imbalance between personal and professional access, which makes it a smart strategy to begin by blitzing our eyes with an image of startling dramatic impact. To the sound of swelling strings, a proscenium safety curtain slowly rises to reveal the ornate gilded auditorium of the Palais Garnier in Paris, where each of the almost 2,000 seats is occupied by a cardboard cutout in a signature Thom Browne gray suit and sunglasses. The effect is surreal.

A model in vertiginous platforms and a more multi-layered version of the same outfit then enters and takes a seat on her suitcase, as if waiting for a train. The show that unfolds (with fashion journalists, buyers and celebrity clients seated along the stage perimeters) represents what she observes. That includes fellow passengers, railway personnel, a gargoyle and chic pigeons in sculptural headpieces (by the British milliner Stephen Jones, a regular Browne collaborator).

That July 2023 show was Browne’s Haute Couture Week debut, making him one of the relatively few American designers to present their work alongside such storied names as Dior, Chanel, Schiaparelli and Valentino. But if Browne is nervous, it doesn’t show while he’s backstage making last-minute adjustments on the models and watching the monitors with satisfaction. He’s not at all like the self-dramatizing designers seen in many fashion docs dashing around in an agitated state, barking instructions and then collapsing in an exhausted heap once the collection has been sent out into the world.

Having such a mild-mannered, seemingly always calm and kind subject is both a distinction and a drawback in Holzemer’s film. Not that every fashion luminary has to be juggling constant crises to be interesting, but the doc is so light on conflict, drama and personal details that can’t be gleaned from past profiles or even a Wikipedia page that at times it feels almost like a promotional video — albeit a deluxe one. It’s gorgeous, but it has no edge.

The closest the movie comes to capturing actual drama is when MJ Rodriguez steps out onto the runway in a 2023 show and a staffer watching on the monitor gasps, “She doesn’t have a jacket on!” But that slip is quickly laughed off after the show with the acknowledgement that while Rodriguez walked in an incomplete outfit, she made it work.

The doc is extremely cozy. Almost every talking head is identified with “and friend” after their profession. Interviewees laud Browne’s tailoring skills or his boundless imagination, his technical virtuosity or his conceptual daring, his uniqueness despite always starting from the baseline of gray-suit uniformity.

It’s all a bit too chummy. Pace is coyly tagged as “Actor,” with no mention of him being married to Browne’s vp of Marketing and Communications, Matthew Foley. Anna Wintour works closely with Bolton each year on the Met Gala, where Browne’s custom designs invariably make a splash. Even the celebrity clients can seem like spokespeople (though Cardi B is a riot). This makes the doc seem rigorously controlled, always a risk in an authorized nonfiction film on a living subject.