Nathaniel Kahn created a stir in the documentary world in 2003 with My Architect, a very personal film about his father, Louis Kahn, an influential but deeply troubled architect from whom Kahn the younger was estranged when Louis died, broke and nearly forgotten. A work that foregrounded the film-maker’s relationship to the subject when such memoir-like strategies weren’t yet common in film practice, My Architect was both a formally fascinating work as well as being one about a compelling, neglected figure from architectural history.

Kahn’s latest doc, The Price of Everything, is a more conventional, drier work that examines how the work of some artists draws huge multimillion-dollar bids at auction houses while the work of others, for no easily graspable reason, goes barely noticed. Jeff Koons, for example, famed for his stainless-steel replicas of balloon creatures and outsized sculptural celebrations of sublime and banal iconography, is arguably, in financial terms, the most successful living artist. Yet many of his recent works are made by a battalion of fabricating minions, and Koons may barely touch the pieces sold in his name. Painter Larry Poons, on the other hand, was once considered a peer of Frank Stella and Jasper Johns but, seemingly unbothered by success, he’s ploughed on untroubled by wealth or acclaim, working away on his lusciously colourful abstractions in his upstate New York studio, assisted by his wife Paula DeLuccia Poons. Perhaps Kahn finds in Poons an echo of his father, but this time round the unsung artistic genius gets a happy ending.

Input from an impressive lineup of art-world megastars – including collectors Stefan Edlis and Inga Rubenstein, auction-house force of nature Amy Cappellazzo, artists George Condo, Gerhard Richter, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Marilyn Minter – gives the film heft and scope. That said, there’s something so fluid, almost nebulous, about its construction that a chasm starts to open up where you would expect to find some kind of unifying thesis.