Is Elizabeth Holmes an intentional liar? That’s the question at the center of Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, which aired on HBO Monday night. You wouldn’t be wrong to think that it’s a question whose answer is self-evident.

Holmes was, after all, the visionary founder and chairwoman of Theranos, the health-technology corporation she dreamed up in 2003 while still a 19-year-old Stanford student. It was a company founded on a “Why didn’t I think of that?”-worthy idea, a solution to the problem of slow, impractical, overpriced blood testing. The most famous image of Holmes sums the breakthrough up brilliantly: a youthful but steel-gazed woman in Silicon Valley armor—a black turtleneck—holding a tiny red vial in her hands, the tech-brained, disruptive solution to so many of our societal problems.

It looked too good to be true—and it was. As has by now been healthily recounted in newspaper and magazine articles, a book, a podcast, and two documentaries, Theranos was at the center of a giant grift. In the years since its founding, the company has gone from a roughly 800-person operation valued at $10 billion to the juiciest Silicon Valley story of the 21st century—and perhaps one of the most instructive.

That’s because, as Gibney’s documentary posits, Holmes the inventor was herself an invention: a talented and typically overconfident Silicon Valley mind following the credos of her industry—faking it until she made it, as far as investors were concerned. She moved fast; she broke things.

The Inventor takes a story we largely already know (but, because it’s juicy, don’t exactly mind hearing again), and retells it through the voices that have been crafting this narrative all along, including The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou (whose bombshell 2015 article first blew the lid off of Theranos’s deception), and Fortune’s Roger Parloff, whose 2014 cover story on Holmes sparked broader public interest in her company. (The documentary was executive-produced by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. V.F. special correspondent Nick Bilton was a consulting producer.)

There are other voices, too, of course—former employees whose consistent details (including a semi-humorous note that Holmes, who insisted on meeting job candidates personally due to her obsession with secrecy, never blinked during their interviews) tell the story of a business that grew increasingly paranoid at having bitten off a larger piece than it could chew. Behind the scenes, Theranos was scrambling to fix ambitious prototypes that weren’t finished (and probably could never be) and struggling to amass enough clout with allies like George Shultz, Rupert Murdoch, Betsy DeVos, General James Mattis, and even Henry Kissinger, to show that broader public trust could be won, even without the company having much of a product to show for itself.

The Theranos debacle is, undeniably, a story about stories, and Holmes was full of them. Other detailed accounts will tell you that, and Gibney’s hokier instincts sell it effectively, albeit without adding much depth to what we already know. (The film repeatedly compares Holmes to Thomas Edison, whom Holmes named her faulty blood-testing device after—another inventor who, as Gibney tells it, talked a big enough game to distract from his failures.) The Inventor also reminds us that Holmes’s claims really were compelling, especially for a country in the midst of a health-care crisis; Gibney’s film rightly points out that Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, the two companies with a monopoly on the blood-testing business, deserved the shake-up Theranos gave them. One only wishes Holmes had proposed something her company could actually pull off.

It’s a good story: the tale of an enterprising young woman with a Steve Jobs vibe (to say nothing of her wardrobe, purposefully modeled on that of the Apple founder) who came to Silicon Valley at precisely the right moment. But as the film shows, this is also a moment in which companies are increasingly delaying their I.P.O.s to avoid greater scrutiny, financial and otherwise. The Inventor is good at giving off the impression of being a thriller about an un-self-aware master scammer—but the questions it raises go far beyond the issue of Holmes alone.

What’s most troubling, fascinating, even funny about The Inventor is the string of journalists who appear in the film, the same people who have long had a hand in telling this story—some of whom were responsible for building up the Holmes mythos, despite the lack of proof that Theranos’s technology actually worked. When Holmes lied, she lied to the press, not simply the public. And she lied in a way that, as the documentary suggests, was par for the course in Silicon Valley. This is a culture predicated on making the impossible seem possible, buttressed by investors whose willingness to throw themselves behind people like Holmes suggests that, like the rest of us, they are often as attached to a good story and a charismatic personality as they are to what the numbers say about how to invest.

Journalists, too, are susceptible to the lure of a good story—but usually not if it has to come at the expense of the truth. The journalists we hear from in the film, save Carreyrou, are open about having been taken in by Holmes’s earnestness and intelligence. Yet they still trace a fine line between outright lies and the particular deceptions Holmes was known for—a line that gives Holmes, and the disruption-obsessed culture she represents, certain moral complexity. “Do we believe that she would say, ‘I knowingly lied’?” says Auletta, pondering the murky recesses of Holmes’s motivations. “Not for a moment do I believe that she lies in bed at night and thinks, ‘I was a swindler. I was a crook. I lied.’” A verklempt Parloff, who seems to have taken Holmes’s untruths especially personally—he gave her the cover of a magazine, after all—echoes Auletta’s remarks. “You know, I don’t know if she’s lying, or if it’s an unconscious, self-protective, reconstructed reality,” he says. “But what is coming out of her mouth is not mapping onto reality.”

Really, does it matter either way whether Holmes is a knowing swindler or somehow oblivious to the truth of Theranos’s deficiencies? This was, to be clear, a scandal in which, through a deal with Walgreens, Theranos customers in Arizona were given dangerously inaccurate medical information—a scandal involving technology that one technician says put him in danger of being pricked by the company’s bloody, contaminated, useless apparatus every time he had to fix it (which was often). This was a scandal in which an experienced lab technician was replaced by a dermatologist—a completely different profession—and in which a lead scientist on the team committed suicide over the anxiety of having to speak out against Theranos at a patent hearing, according to his own wife.

What’s interesting isn’t so much whether Holmes knowingly lied or not, but the fact that journalists, who went so far as to share their interview recordings with Gibney, remain so fascinated with this question. The strange truth of The Inventor is that even now that the breadth of her deceptions has become clear, Holmes still fascinates. The reporters in the film are still surprisingly breathless when describing her meteoric rise and catastrophic fall; they still, even from this vantage, spin stories of her childhood interest in Moby-Dick. To even pose the question of whether her lies count as the worst kind of lies is beside the point. The real fun, Gibney suggests, is in wondering about the things we can’t know: Holmes’s inner life and motivation, the person that’s revealed when we peel back the layers of self-deception that landed her here—to say nothing of her strategic image-making, in which even Errol Morris played a part. In the end, Holmes remains the complex, magnetic, repulsive, odd, completely watchable star of a thriller that’s ongoing. And the rest of us remain her captive audience.

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