“Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?” is a new documentary about art authentication with dubious claims on its own legitimacy. Ostensibly, it tells the story of Teri Horton, a 73-year-old former long-haul truck driver with an “eighth-grade education” who happened to buy a large abstract painting at a thrift shop for $5. Never mind why she bought it (originally as a gift, even though she thought it ugly), what matters is that a local art teacher checked it out and thought the picture might be an original Jackson Pollock. Ms. Horton’s response: “Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?”

A more accurate title for the film might have been “Who the $#%& Does the Art World Think It Is?” Unfortunately for its creators — director Harry Moses and producer Steven Hewitt (the executive producer is Don Hewitt, creator of “60 Minutes”) — all its arrows fly wide of their mark. Far from being a documentary, the film is rather an exercise in deception, a vehicle greased by anti-intellectualism.

Ms. Horton never learns much about Pollock, only about his market: A large drip painting by the Abstract Expressionist can, we’re told, sell for as much as $50 million in today’s market (or considerably more: in early November, David Geffen sold a Pollock, albeit with a far better provenance, for $140 million). Newly enlightened on the subject, she sought out art experts, all of whom apparently disappointed her; either they didn’t believe the Pollock to be genuine or they wouldn’t look at it because it lacked a provenance (a documented history of ownership). And even when she invented a provenance, the experts didn’t accept the painting.

The audience is meant to believe these art-world experts reject the painting because they’re too stuck up to look past the truck-driving, chain-smoking owner and behold the Pollock. It seems never to have occurred to Messrs. Moses or Hewitt that snobbish art-world experts would claw each other’s eyes out to be involved in the discovery of a previously unknown and genuine Pollock drip painting, no matter how badly dressed its bearer.

When the so-called experts dismiss her, Ms. Horton engages the services of Peter Paul Biro, who is described as “a leading forensics art authenticator” — he may well be. Mr. Biro’s specialty is fingerprints, and after extensive examination he comes upon a partial print on the back of the painting. But there are no known Pollock fingerprints with which to compare it, so Mr. Biro goes to Pollock’s old studio, locates a print on the back of a paint can, and then claims that the two prints match.

This becomes the trump card for the filmmakers, who want to establish a battle between connoisseurship — represented here by those snooty art-world experts — and the supposedly far more concrete evidence of forensic science, represented by the fingerprint. And yet, they stack the deck. Of all the “expert” connoisseurs they interview, not one is a recognized Pollock specialist. The most famous, Thomas Hoving, directed the Metropolitan Museum of Art some 30 years ago and was a medieval art historian. The closest they come is Ben Heller, an important collector of Pollock’s work. Still, despite the lack of real specialists, the substance of Mr. Hoving’s remarks, as well as those by Mr. Heller and an artist who knew Pollock, seem entirely knowledgeable and reasonable.

Instead of delving into the question of why, exactly, Messrs. Hoving or Heller don’t believe the work to be a Pollock, the filmmakers descend into farce: They bring in other “experts,” including John Myatt, a famous forger, and Tod Volpe, a con man who has spent years in prison and who once posed as an art dealer. Mr. Volpe claims that if experts don’t believe it’s a Pollock, they should prove it’s not one — which, of course, is backwards. It’s the people asking for $50 million who must prove their work authentic.

Why resort to such figures if one believes in the authenticity of the Pollock? Perhaps it’s because the film’s premise is faulty.”That’s the conflict and the fear that the art world has,”Mr. Moses claims in the voice-over.”If forensic evidence is accepted, what does that do to connoisseurship? It will make it unimportant, and I believe the art world experts are threatened by it.”

The fact is, however, that connoisseurship in no way conflicts with forensic science: Real authentication almost always requires both, and today museums employ laboratories full of technicians who conduct all sorts of tests, from x-rays to paint analysis.

And, far from being conclusive, fingerprint evidence is notoriously hazy: Indeed, it is interpretive in almost exactly the same way as connoisseurship. At one point, Mr. Heller suggests they compare Ms. Horton’s painting with a confirmed Pollock. The scene in which they do this (the close-up photos of the two flash by much too quickly for even a summary judgment, and again they fail to have a scholar or specialist discuss any similarities or differences between Ms. Horton’s painting and a real Pollock) parallels one in which the two fingerprints are compared by Mr. Biro: Matching the smudged, swirling lines of a fingerprint turns out to be remarkably similar to comparing the spaghetti drips of the paintings. Both operations rely on visual interpretation. Except that paintings contain many more elements of comparison, such as the use of color (never discussed in the film) or the types of marks the artist made, be they drips, scrapings, or paint squeezed directly from a tube (again, not touched upon in the film).

Were one even to grant the fingerprint evidence, what could it prove? Only that the same person, who may or may not be Jackson Pollock, touched both the paint can and the back of that painting — nothing more. For anything else, we have to go back to the experts.

Despite being narrated in the style of television news documentaries, with authoritative voice-overs, this film is a sham designed to appeal to an audience’s reverse snobbery. You might wonder how this fraud — meaning the documentary, not the faux Pollock — came about in the first place. It turns out Mr. Volpe, the convicted con man who, in addition to being credited as a “creative consultant”on the film, has formed a nefarious “investment group”to sell shares in the painting, initiated this project from the beginning. That’s what we call a suspicious provenance.