Actor James Franco (HOWL) teams up with filmmaker Travis Mathews (the provocative short film I WANT YOUR LOVE and its feature expansion) to "imagine" the forty minutes that William Friedkin claimed to have cut from his film CRUISING to appease the MPAA. Cast in Al Pacino's lead role - and alternately instructed to interpret Pacino's character by Mathews and to be "Pacino-esque" by Franco - is one of Franco's "Playhouse West" colleagues Val Lauren (who had previously essayed the lead in Franco's Sal Mineo biopic SAL) heading a cast of actors, models, and other sorts of performers who are either fans of the film, interested in pushing their limits, or just eager to be James Franco-adjacent (including some who were under the impression that they might actually be having sex with the actor). Without a script and hazily directed (Mathews is shown engaging in a complex choreography of the many extras and featured players while Franco offers Lauren little beyond encouragement), Lauren - straight and attached - doubts his abilities and questions the value of depicting certain acts onscreen, but steadfastly supports Franco even as he struggles to find meaning and sincerity in his collegue's intent more so than worrying about whether his own preconceptions about his sexuality will be challenged.

Once one realizes that this is actually a semi-scripted/improvised narrative piece disguised as a documentary, the pointlessness of "imagining" deleted scenes - without consultation of Friedkin, his script or notes, or any vault materials (which may not even exist) - becomes less of an issue compared to the imbalance of power between Lauren and Franco. Franco tries to justify his motives by expressing a resentment at how he has been raised to perceive normality as well as an argument about how graphic violence is more acceptable than graphic sex (especially gay sex) in American cinema; but Franco's mainstream career has survived the "risks" the provocateur has taken thus far, while it seems that a relative unknown like Lauren is taking the greater risk given the subject matter as well as being the one to appear onscreen as far as the film-within-a-film is concerned (Franco is seen photographic some scenes from other angles, but it is not clear whether he is actually shooting footage to be used in the finished short or behind the scenes video). Franco as a filmmaker (onscreen) is off-putting here, but it is difficult to determine how much of what we see is caricature (he doesn't seem far off from his body pillow-loving guest shot on 30 ROCK); and the ambiguity the ending seems to suggest isn't that of the protagonist but that of the filmmakers.