Living, as we are, in the age of Kickstarter and iMovie, we as a culture would do well to coin a term for documentaries of nebulous quality about subjects of endless fascination. (My proposal: Broomfields. Or maybe Sugarmans?) Whatever the term, Advanced Style is a perfect example. Its endlessly fascinating subjects are seven New York women, all between the ages of 62 and 95, each driven by a singular, rigorously maintained sense of style and joie de vivre. These women explode upon the screen in the same way they lit up producer Ari Cohen's instigating street-fashion blog (also called Advanced Style). While your eyes feast on the incredible visuals (one subject describes searching seven years for the right earrings to top off an outfit—"You don't show a painting till it's done!"), the women hold forth on their life philosophies and share their fascinating backstories. It's not all feel-good stuff, either: The last stretch of the film confronts pain, infirmity, memory loss, and death (albeit the finest death an elderly woman of style can possibly have).

But alongside these fascinating subjects runs a supplementary plot about the making of the film, and its connection to the Advanced Style blog, and the thoughts and feelings of its twentysomething creator, who apparently feels a kinship with his subjects because he was close to his grandmother. The quality of these segments is somewhere between a promotional book trailer and an explanatory video accompanying a Kickstarter campaign, and they just can't compete with the amazing stories they're distracting from. So go see Advanced Style for the fascinating humans and visuals, and stay despite the weird framing device.