It’s been a wild ride for Justin Lin, and he’s the first to concede the pun: that most filmmakers would never have been able to finish his new film, “Finishing the Game,” a mockumentary about the making of Bruce Lee’s final film, “Game of Death.” Catapulted to fame in 2002 with his high school-themed dark comedy “Better Luck Tomorrow,” Mr. Lin became something of a film festival phenomenon, crossing over into the mainstream as one of the most promising film artists of his generation. But unlike others who have used the festival circuit as a launching pad for sustainable indie careers — think Wes Anderson, Kevin Smith, or Noah Baumbach — Mr. Lin’s journey has taken a few unexpected turns.

Mr. Lin returned to action last year with two films: “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” a vapid summer tent-pole for Universal Pictures, and “Annapolis,” a critically savaged procedural about the Naval Academy that Touchstone Pictures dropped unceremoniously into theaters in late January. The pair of titles left the film community scratching its head over what had happened to the independent spirit that was in such fine form in “Better Luck Tomorrow.”

More to the point, some wondered if Mr. Lin had sold out.

“I wish there was an ideal world, an ideal path that I’d love to take, but I don’t live in that world and there is no guidebook,” the 34-year-old director said in a recent interview. “But I feel like I’ve had the opportunity to make a credit card movie, to be a young filmmaker in a studio, to make a summer popcorn movie — it’s all given me a lot of perspective. Those films have helped me buy my independence, to actually be able to afford to do a credit card movie. Because I’ve done it the other way before, to max out 10 credit cards and to go into debt $100,000 on a film, and it’s a bad deal.”

Mr. Lin said he’s had the idea for his latest “credit card movie” for more than 10 years. He was raised in Los Angeles during the 1980s and immersed himself in late-night weekend screenings of “Kung Fu Theater” at local theaters and in stacks of Bruce Lee films on VHS. He became fascinated with the martial arts icon, as well as with the foreign concept of a body double, when he slowly came to learn the history of “Game of Death,” a movie that was completed after Mr. Lee’s death. The film features only 12 minutes of footage that Lee had left behind, and builds the remainder of its action around a stand-in.

“Finishing the Game,” which makes its New York premiere today at the IFC Center, is a fictionsal re-creation of the casting process that went into finding Lee’s body double, serving both as a comedy about Hollywood’s competitive landscape and a scathing satire of the industry’s stereotyping of the Asian community.

For Mr. Lin and other Asian-American directors, the dearth of projects made about the Asian community or made by Asian filmmakers, and the relegation of most actors to such inconsequential side roles as deliveryman or action-film bad-guys, is a troubling issue.

So it’s appropriate that half of “Finishing the Game” is structured as a mock audition sequence, in which a panel of white men and women stereotypically critique the faces, voices, and mannerisms of hopeful Asian actors. Within the circle of auditioners, meanwhile, Mr. Lin paints a sobering picture of cut-throat competition, insecure personalities, and, above all, a pervasive sense of denial about the way the entertainment world works.

“Each character in this movie has their own brand of denial,” he said. “For better or worse, especially in L.A., everyone you meet either wants to be an actor, producer, or director — the whole town is filled with people like that, and sometimes you can’t help but just shake your head at all these people convinced they are going to make it. So in this sense, actors are constantly in this state of competitiveness. And Asian-American actors in particular, when there’s a role out there that might not even be a great role, will do crazy things to get the part.”

In his film, Mr. Lin breaks down the cast of hopefuls into a parade of archetypes: the fading star insulted that he has to audition to get the part; the dreamer who continues to hope for that big break; the insecure newcomer who relentlessly falls back on his manager/girlfriend for encouragement, and the talentless hack who relies on his good looks to see him through. Yet the further we are drawn into this bubble of aggression, the more Mr. Lin reminds us of the flimsy carrot-on-a-stick waiting at the end of this competition — it’s hardly the role of a lifetime, just the opportunity to serve as little more than a body double in a stereotypical, big-budget martial-arts film.

It’s a concept that clearly hits home for Mr. Lin, who has now worked in both the independent and mainstream communities. Several scenes in “Finishing the Game” seem to be a rejection, even a disgusted dismissal, of the studio system. It’s this back-and-forth, between straight humor and pointed satire, that lends the film the ethos that makes it something greater than another Christopher Guest imitation. In a twisted irony, Mr. Lin said he’s received sizable offers over the years from major studios interested in “Finishing the Game” — $12 million offers he has rejected upon realizing that he’d be expected to produce something more “silly,” in the vein of Stephen Chow’s “Kung-Fu Hustle.”

Mr. Lin said it was his studio experience — and his studio paychecks — that made it possible for him to reject those offers, and to finish “Finishing” on his own terms.

“It’s not like you go to Sundance and they offer you all these movies. At the end of the day, I had to work three jobs to pay off my student films, so at this point in my life I’m seeing my day job as doing my studio projects,” he said. “What I’ve learned is that the world of independent cinema has been co-opted by the system. People talk about making movies now for $1 million as very low budget, and they talk about a film with a big star as if they are packaging a project for a major studio. You get a name like Tom Cruise in your ‘indie’ movie, then you’ve got a chance, but if you have an Asian movie like ‘Finishing the Game,’ and if it’s not something ‘bankable’ like ‘Kung-Fu Hustle,’ then you’re really going to have to get down and dirty.”

ssnyder@nysun.com