You can take the kid out of the quagmire, but you can’t take the quagmire out of the kid. That’s one way of looking at “Operation Filmmaker,” a spry, morbidly entertaining documentary about a 25-year-old aspiring filmmaker spirited out of Baghdad and dropped onto a Hollywood set as a production assistant. But as director Nina Davenport involves herself in her subject’s cross-cultural growing pains and intrigues, her provocative film becomes just as much an unfolding anatomy of fiction-making as it is a shifting portrait and a fraught adventure in liberal guilt.

“Operation Filmmaker,” opening this week at the IFC Center, is classic unplanned-detour cinema. After the actor Liev Schreiber spotted Muthana Mohmed in an MTV segment about the latter’s bombed-out art school, the intermittently charming Iraqi was imported to work on the Prague set of “Everything Is Illuminated,” Mr. Schreiber’s directorial debut. Ms. Davenport, an award-winning documentarian, was hired to shoot something short about Muthana’s experience.

Then, as the movie pitch might go, reality set in. Instead of a glorified DVD extra, what we get in “Operation Filmmaker” is a brisk, shrewdly observant record of Muthana as, variously, an entitled slacker, an unwilling ambassador-slash-walking allegory, a refugee far from family, a typical film-student dreamer, a grateful fan of President Bush, and a subject of a documentary directed and funded by his sometime savior, his nemesis, and our handwringer, Ms. Davenport.

The first leg of the film traces a twofold disappointment: Muthana’s unconcealed contempt for the gopher errands that keep him off-set, and the rapidly burnt-off patience of Mr. Schreiber, producer Peter Saraf, and other self-regarding do-gooders. This young man, in over his head, at first evokes our sympathy, as well as a vicarious take-this-job-and-shove-it enjoyment. Muthana, with his center-parted hair mop, stormy brow, and wry grin, shirks duties to party and rejects the fundamentals of toadying.

The arena shifts, with Muthana playing fast and loose with visa deadlines, to his gig on the set of the Rock’s video-game shoot-em-up, “Doom,” also filming in Prague. Ms. Davenport introduces some evergreens about war, bloody spectacle, and guilt, and, in a bold hybrid move, interpolates footage from cameras she has sent to Muthana’s friends back in Baghdad, who drink to forget and urge him not to return.

The gesture foreshadows the director’s increasing ceding to Muthana’s pestering for cash and aid; she’s already given unsolicited advice in an early breach of standard practices. The young Iraqi’s mealy-mouthed justifications and Ms. Davenport’s own self-explanations (conveyed in sheepish intertitles) echo one another, and the whole dance cleverly plays on our own suspicions, biases, and guilt about the behavior of all parties. (From this seat, Muthana, who mentions a comfortable pre-war upper-middle-class existence, resembles someone accustomed to asking for stuff, and whose pride mainly seems to get in the way of work.)

Ms. Davenport’s neatly shot film truly becomes its own making-of meta-chronicle when Muthana issues demands that confront assumptions about the ethics of documentary and performance. By the time Muthana has made his way to London to try film school, her open monetary support and voiced desire for a happy ending challenge our distinctions between “Operation Filmmaker” and a funded fictional production. In this light, the film also becomes a testament to the power of stories and persuasion; throughout, we watch and evaluate the effect of Muthana’s tales of woe, told by himself or, by proxy, through oft-glimpsed news broadcasts.

It’s Muthana’s “plight,” to use the language of good intentions, that originally lured Mr. Schreiber, Ms. Davenport, and others. But, in fact, the movie’s weakest strand is its parallels with America and Iraq. Any post-screening judgment of Muthana and his benefactors does tend to segue into debates about the premise and conduct of the war, but the movie’s shorthand about this is less fruitful than the interpersonal gamesmanship and meta-story. The concerns also lead to a regrettably glib final title card from Ms. Davenport.

The war works well as a floating signifier, a bit like the South in Ross McElwee’s “Sherman’s March,” another detoured documentary that’s one of the influences on Ms. Davenport’s oeuvre. More impressive, the filmmaker enriches her project with elegant, exquisitely placed complications: Muthana’s African roommate in London, is also a refugee; and a veteran creature actor on the insipid “Doom” sheds a tear over the solitude of his work. Editing is paramount throughout, just as much for what’s omitted: Published interviews with Ms. Davenport suggest she’s withheld much bullying by Muthana, in another bit of fictionesque authorial pruning.

“Operation Filmmaker,” therefore, goes beyond its Iraq hook to become something of an ethical case study with mix-and-match geopolitical and personal currents and standards (naiveté or connivance? Individual responsibility or systemic failure?). Ultimately, though, Muthana’s headstrong struggles suggest yet another way in which war can smuggle trauma as if virally off the fields of battle and, shifting shape and form, into life and culture.