Review: In ‘Flipside,’ the untold stories of a wanna-be documentarian coalesce into wisdom

Midlifers, be forewarned as Chris Wilcha’s “Flipside” amiably rolls along: Before this essayistic, personal documentary about creativity and compromise even hits its stride, you’ll find yourself in a commiserative funk about whatever grand dream of artistic fulfillment you set aside to make a living. And yet, over the years, his efforts to immortalize it on film kept stalling, until it began to symbolize for him a nagging pattern in the filmmaker’s life: so many personally meaningful documentary ideas started and never finished, while the gigs that paid the bills — directing commercials — filled his schedule. There are other mini-portraits, too, of creative figures who cross Wilcha’s orbit and speak to the film’s peculiar nexus of achievement, circumstance and self-reflection, including oddball comedian Uncle Floyd, whose fame window was brief but whose cult status inspired a David Bowie song; TV impresario David Milch, plagued by demons and Alzheimer’s disease but driven by generosity; and god-tier jazz photographer Herman Leonard. Of all his shelved hard drives, however, Wilcha’s movie about the record store felt like the one that got away.