It seems perverse to begin a review of a documentary — one about a well-known, latter-day sports legend, at that — with something as mundanely cautious as a spoiler alert. Until recently, if general knowledge hadn’t already acquainted a viewer with the outcome of a non-fiction feature, or if the laws of real, unheightened life hadn’t made it patently obvious, the filmmakers would usually do the job for us anyway, working backwards from set facts to find the variables we don’t know, or didn’t know we knew.
With a new breed of documentarists getting ever more playfully shape-shifting in they ways they trade information and manipulate point of view — last year’s talking-point docs “Catfish” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop” both hinged on an abrupt turn not only in perspective, but in subject — Asif Kapadia’s dazzling biopic “Senna” instead subverts expectations by keeping its storytelling fiercely linear. Viewers unfamiliar with the story of Ayrton Senna, the reckless, beautiful Brazilian Formula 1 racing driver who rose to prominence in the 1980s and ended his career as arguably the greatest in the sport’s history, are offered no pat framing devices and wistful talking heads to say what became of him, beyond the unhappy use of the past tense.