For “Mayor Pete,” the documentarian Jesse Moss followed Buttigieg — the current transportation secretary and former mayor of South Bend, Ind.
“In my way of coming at the world, the stronger an emotion is, the more private it is,” he says in an interview for the film.
But Moss — a director of “Boys State,” in a sense a companion look at political novices finding their voices — hasn’t succeeded in becoming a fly on the wall, if such a thing is possible during a heavily photographed campaign.
Occasionally the movie encounters situations that appear as if they weren’t intended to be filmed, as when Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, points out that he’s not going to be positioned as prominently as other candidates’ spouses in Iowa.