Now that the populist, first-person documentary has become a virus on big screens as well as small, it seems as if any monkey with a video camera and Final Cut software can aspire to be the next Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock. Surprisingly, the techniques popularized by those hammy, activist filmmakers actually serve as a useful template in the right hands — even though their semi-naïve narration, ironic commentary, and cleverly edited archival clips can be as much a cliché as the photo zooms in a Ken Burns epic.

Christopher Bell pulls it off in “Bigger, Stronger, Faster*,” which opens Friday in the city. At once thoughtful and irreverent, painfully personal and frequently hilarious, the film could easily bill itself as the “real” “Super Size Me.” Where Mr. Spurlock’s tongue-in-cheek debut investigated the effects of fast food on American health, Mr. Bell brings a far more complex perspective to the subject of anabolic steroids and their epidemic use in competitive sports — from the Olympics to the lower circles of the professional wrestling circuit.

The fledgling writer-director knows a little about the latter: His older brother Mike (aka “Mad Dog”) and younger brother Mark (aka “Smelly”) took up wrestling and bodybuilding as children and continued to pursue livelihoods in those fields as adults. Both men became heavy steroid users, one of them to a dangerous, addictive degree.

How dangerous, exactly? Mr. Bell and his writer-producers, Tamsin Rawady and Alex Buono (who also runs camera), work hard at questioning received knowledge, and work harder at exposing the myriad hypocrisies generated by the national controversy over the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances in sports at every level.

Why are the same drugs that were used to promote American victory against the godless forces of communism in Olympic battles of the 1950s and ’60s (thus evoking the superiority of capitalist democracy) now cause for medal winners to be stripped of their silver and gold? Why offer up popcultural icons like Hulk Hogan and former bodybuilding champ and now California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as positive role models to keep America’s youth drug-free when both men’s careers are unabashed endorsements for steroid use? Mr. Schwarzenegger becomes the film’s great white whale, as Mr. Bell angles for an encounter to confront the actor-politico about a bodybuilding competition he sponsors. Unlike Mr. Moore’s bizarre and sad meeting with Charlton Heston in “Bowling for Columbine,” Mr. Bell’s impromptu handshake with Der Governator on Venice Beach is over in a flash and winds up as a grinning photo op on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Bell is no Mike Wallace.

However, this mookish kid with his baseball cap worn backward turns out to be piercingly investigative when it comes to his own family. The emotional gravity and tough love that ground some difficult, truth-telling moments are worth a hundred facile “Oprah” episodes, exposing the profound ache suffered by many of those who wholeheartedly purchased the American myth of winning at any and all costs.