Conceptual artist John Baldessari gets a rapid-fire biography narrated by Tom Waits, whose gravelly deadpan matches the artist's own dry humor. The film moves through Baldessari's career in West Coast art, from his early paintings to the 1970 decision to burn nearly all of them, an act he documented and turned into a piece called Cremation Project. Photographs, film clips, and Baldessari's own text-based and photo-collage works are cut together at a brisk pace, tracking his shift from painting into conceptual art built on language, appropriated images, and dots he places over faces in found photographs. Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, known for Catfish and Paranormal Activity 3, keep the tone playful rather than reverent, echoing Baldessari's own refusal to take the art world too seriously. It runs short but covers the arc of a five-decade career, landing on the ideas that made Baldessari one of the more influential and least self-important figures in American conceptual art.