What begins as a thinly veiled and far-fetched act of idol worship evolves into a surprisingly involving and introspective coming-of-age quest in “Walking to Werner,” a film that may suffer unfairly in some quarters due to its misleading title. Hoping to emulate his hero, the famed German director Werner Herzog, who once famously walked from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit a dying friend, the young, self-taught filmmaker Linas Phillips sets out from Seattle for Los Angeles with the hope of meeting the icon in person.

From the very first mile, Mr. Phillips’s journey is something one could easily dismiss — either as the misguided mission of an obsessed fan, or the shrewd marketing ploy of a young filmmaker seeking attention. But the farther he presses on, the less cheap the whole thing seems. While he may have walked the first few miles with some conscious strategy in mind, around the 300th, 500th, and 1,000th miles, it becomes increasingly difficult to write him off.

While not exactly trekking through the wilderness, as Mr. Herzog has become famous for doing during movie shoots in the jungle, Mr. Phillips’s strategy is not all that different: he walking along the shoulder of Highway 101 down the West Coast, filming himself for half the journey, holding the camera as he walks and talks. Later, a cameraman joins him, walking by his side, and Mr. Phillips keeps in constant contact with a producer (via a cell phone), who tries to help him find accommodations — hotels, parks, camp sites — at the end of each day’s trek.

“Most of this was pretty boring,” he concedes of his highway march late in the film, but by that time, we’ve become sufficiently wrapped up in his spiritual journey to find this admission surprising. The farther Mr. Phillips marches, the more people he meets, and the further he seems to drift into a place of self-examination, frustration and, occasionally, rage. Out on the highway alone at midnight, in the middle of the California desert without a car in sight and miles to go before he rests, there’s the sensation that Mr. Phillips the filmmaker/marketer has broken down into Linus the frail human. After weeks and months, and hundreds of miles, it becomes impossible not to see something quietly profound about his perseverance and determination.

Particularly since he knows that his mission is doomed from the outset. In the very early days of his walk, around the time he reaches his 100th mile, Mr. Phillips reaches out to Mr. Herzog and gets a call back. Listening to the voicemail left by his idol, Mr. Phillips hears the sad truth that Mr. Herzog will not be in Los Angeles when he arrives. Mr. Herzog is heading off to Laos — to shoot “Rescue Dawn,” no doubt — but he has a message for Mr. Phillips that is at once deflating and inspiring: Do not walk for him. It would be a trite way to end the film. “If you want to walk, do it for some other reason,” Mr. Herzog’s disembodied voice commands.

Thus the stage is set for something other than an act of emulation: an open-ended road trip that is no longer about the destination, but the journey. With this shift in the film’s tone, away from talk about Mr. Herzog and more to talk of his own life, Mr. Phillips proves able to bring his introspection to the fore. Not that Mr. Herzog is missing entirely — clips from DVD commentary tracks punctuate the soundtrack, offering a bizarre Herzog narration to Mr. Phillips’s experiences. When the German director’s monologue circles his theory of “ecstatic truth,” it’s hard not to see Mr. Phillips’s journey as something the puts that theory into practice.

If the film’s first half is about Mr. Phillips’s struggles to overcome shin splints and the disappointment that his hero will not be waiting for him, the second half is about the people he meets along the way who come to define the journey. There’s the drug addict who talks about her abusive childhood, the wood carver who spontaneously confesses that he once accidentally killed a man, and the old, bearded man with a walking stick who reveals that he’s been walking for years since the murder of his wife and children in an armed robbery.

So much of Mr. Herzog’s career has been about taking a chance for sake of taking one, about pushing forward despite the million good reasons to turn back. As young Mr. Phillips reaches the Golden Gate Bridge, and, unable to hold is exhilaration, twirls around against a San Francisco sunset, it’s difficult not to feel that he has achieved something greater than shaking hands with his idol.

That night, on that bridge, he says there’s nowhere else in the world he’d rather be. His eyes are open to people and places in ways they weren’t before, and he can feel a force growing within him that will propel him on to Los Angeles. It’s his own moment of ecstatic truth — that regardless of why he began his journey, here he is breathing life into a dream far richer than any walk to Werner.