Edward Snowden sits on his hotel-room bed, about to keystroke a password into his laptop. Without looking particularly sheepish about it, he drapes a blanket over his head and upper body, so he can comfortably input the information without being observed. This gesture evokes many things: a kid reading a book under the covers at night; the Elephant Man disguising his grotesqueness; a conspiracy theorist muttering warnings about cosmic rays coming through his skull. None of these associations is unjustified, and all underscore the absorbing character study that Citizenfour presents in you-are-there fashion.

There’s a layer of irony to this moment, too: Snowden has invited documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (The Oath) and The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald into his Hong Kong hotel room precisely so he can be observed. Much of what we see takes place during a week in June 2013, when Snowden first spilled information he took from his job at the National Security Agency. The biggest bombshell (to date) was evidence that the U.S. government was doing much more spying on ordinary citizens than it admitted. In this context, clicking the SEND button carries as much weight as Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. This straightforward documentary may be smaller-scaled than a political thriller, but it has similar suspense: Everybody in the room realizes the stakes—and the dangers—of exposing a whistleblower to public scrutiny.

One man’s whistleblower is another man’s traitor, a debate that Poitras doesn’t pause to consider, so confident is she of Snowden’s cause. The question is worth another documentary, if only to lay out Snowden’s rationale to people who might be on the fence about all this. Having this access to Snowden in the exact hours he went from being a nonentity with top-secret clearance to a hero/pariah is a rare chance to see a now-historical character in the moment of truth. He emerges as hyperarticulate, careful, nerdy, paranoid, and concerned with the amount of mousse he puts in his hair. His vocal delivery is oddly reminiscent of Seth Rogen’s. He might be just a little hollow at the core, or he might be so principled he actually doesn’t care how his actions will make his life uncomfortable. And at the end of the film, we get a scene that suggests that Snowden is not alone in his whistleblowing status—a tantalizing hint (scribbled by Greenwald on pieces of paper, that secure system of passing secrets) of another story to come. Maybe it’s best to think of Citizenfour as the first of many films on this affair. Opens Fri., Oct. 31 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 114 mInutes.

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