Manhood opens where you'd expect — a needle, a numbing agent, a strip mall — and then promptly goes somewhere weirder. Daniel Lombroso, who made his name at the Atlantic and New Yorker dissecting fringy male subcultures adjacent to white nationalism, has found a subject that lets him do the same thing without the ideological scaffolding. The penis enlargement industry turns out to be a more honest mirror of American male anxiety than anything explicitly political. Bill Moore is the documentary's center of gravity: a gay man in Dallas who charges $15,000 to $20,000 per outpatient penile enhancement procedure, is not a doctor, and has expanded his company PhalloFill to 32 locations across the country. Lombroso introduces him tongue-kissing his lap dog in bed, admiring a body he's had extensively work done on, cheerfully insisting nobody would suspect. The gap between Moore's self-perception and reality is where the film lives. The film's three subjects give Lombroso three different angles on the same problem. Ruben, a father of five who sells his house to fund an enhancement procedure, fills his days with Joe Rogan and spends his nights bombing at comedy open mics to empty rooms. His wife Lana watches the household destabilize while maintaining a diplomatic non-stance on the whole enterprise. The film doesn't editorialize — it just holds the frame long enough for the logic to collapse under its own weight. The third subject, David, is where Manhood earns its keep as documentary filmmaking. A young man seeking corrective work after a botched procedure by Victor Loria — a self-described mob-adjacent practitioner who keeps a large malpractice disclaimer on his wall 'like Martin Luther's 95 Theses' — David's arc eventually reveals an OnlyFans past, a throuple arrangement with Moore and Moore's partner, and a conversion from reluctant subject to enthusiastic film ambassador. Lombroso describes convincing David to appear as 'one of the hardest acts of persuasion I've ever done.' The result is the film's emotional core. Lombroso is scrupulous about not telling the audience how to feel, which is both the film's strength and its occasional weakness. The film's observation that Moore's practice constitutes gender-affirming care — patience, empathy, attention to male self-image — is genuinely sharp, and deliberately left hanging. The megachurch pastor, the border patrol agent: men who might view Moore as less than masculine, receiving from him exactly the tender affirmation they can't get anywhere else. The film earns that irony without hammering it. The scale of the phenomenon is documented: a 2024 study of US Google searches found rising interest in penile-enhancement injections from 2013 through 2022, and Moore's ambition is to make the procedure as common as Botox. What the film does best is show that the demand isn't really about the procedure. 'There are all these stats about the huge percentage of American men who obsess over it,' Lombroso says. 'And it connects all these other things — like how many older American men don't know how to make a best friend.' At 90 minutes, Manhood is disciplined enough to keep all three storylines in motion without letting any one of them become a thesis statement. It's a film that trusts the audience to draw the line between the boat-that-is-never-big-enough metaphor and what it actually costs a family when a man decides that metaphor is his to solve.
