AllMovie

One gets the feeling that making Based on a True Story was a difficult experience for documentarian Walter Stokman. The main subject of his film, convicted bank robber John Wojtowicz, whose story was the basis for the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, was unreasonably demanding, uncooperative, and threatening. To Stokman's credit, he made the most out of what he was able to get, fittingly turning Wojtowicz's eccentric recalcitrance into part of the story. While the results are interesting, and would make a superlative extra on a special edition DVD of Dog Day Afternoon, there's also a frustrating sense of missed opportunity. Wojtowicz may have an inflated ego, but his side of the story is, in fact, critical to Stokman's professed purpose in making the film. The depiction of the pivotal event in Wojtowicz's life is incomplete, but the portrait of the man himself that emerges through his phone calls with Stokman, and through the personal history the filmmaker has gathered, is fascinating and tragic. It's also a trenchant look at the strange human need to make our most personal anguish a public spectacle, comically reflected in one former hostage's effort to turn her ordeal into a pop song. Stokman certainly makes Wojtowicz out to be the bad guy -- a stumbling block in getting his own story told -- but the true nature of their relationship as filmmaker and subject appears a bit more complicated.