Doug Pray's Art & Copy is the latest entry in a burgeoning new subgenre of documentary film: the Artsy Homage, in which a subject of the sort typically taken up by Canadian public-television programs or "Annals of..." New Yorker essays is given the full-length-documentary treatment. As their name implies, Artsy Homages are almost exclusively loving portraits, flattering by design: Gary Hustwit's Helvetica, one of the standard bearers of the subgenre, is billed as "a love letter to a font." The resulting films are elevated above the products of Canadian television and into the realm of New Yorker essays by the work of the filmmakers, who attack their subjects with exhaustive gusto and craft their loving portraits with an artist's eye.

Art & Copy's essay-worthy subject is the American advertising industry, with Pray weaving interviews with history-making major players of the ad world—the minds behind "I Want My MTV!" "Got Milk?" and Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign ad—with footage of the legendary ads themselves. Few if any art forms receive such intense second-to-second attention from their creators as the television commercial, and showcasing classics of the form on the big screen does plenty to highlight their artistry. Background and insight are provided by talking heads, who sometimes seem baffled by the power of their own blockbuster creations. (Did the man who wrote "Where's the Beef?" know he was composing a generational slogan? No, he did not.)

As with other Artsy Homages—specifically, Hustwit's industrial-design pageant Objectified—Art & Copy's focus on triumph gets a little one-note; both films could've been paired with supplementary features devoted entirely to the failures, rough drafts, and ideas that fizzled in their respective fields. Still, Pray's ad-world victory lap is perfectly enjoyable in its own right, and anyone interested in mass communication should see it.