Forget your dusty old sweaters and moldy, drafty blankets: There are a lot of exciting, creative and vibrant things happening in the world of yarn. You just wouldn’t get that impression walking out of "Yarn," one of the Art & Artists documentary selections at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival. Given a sprawling quilt’s worth of solid storytelling threads to work with, Icelandic director Una Lorenzen unfortunately only knits together a few moderately interesting socks.

The material is certainly there – quite literally – as "Yarn" unwinds around the globe and needles in on four diverse and daring yarn artists in action.

One, Tinna Thorudottir Thorvaldar, works as a graffiti artist – but with wool rather than paint and stickers, stapling up bright pieces of crocheted rebellion around Iceland and Cuba. The Polish-born Olek also uses yarn for unexpectedly bright and bold art works – most notably, a collection of knitted multi-colored camo bodysuits – that probably wouldn’t enchant your knit-happy grandma (especially the window piece proclaiming "Keep calm & eat my c*ck" in yarn) but have enchanted art house crowds here in America and worldwide.

Meanwhile, in the doc’s most intoxicating chapter, Canadian-based yarn artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam uses her craving for crochet to create massive, colorfully webbed pools of hanging yarn for children to play on like a bouncy, woolen Chuck E. Cheese’s. Her tightly wound playgrounds of loose, free childish exploration look so delightful that a viewer can easily find oneself regretting being stuck in a theater seat.

That feeling of regret only grows – for unfortunately far less whimsical and entertaining reasons – as "Yarn" sluggishly unravels throughout its thin 79-minute running time. That’s especially the case during the doc’s last intertwined artist profile: a band of Swedish circus performers assembling a yarn-themed conceptual show that mostly comes off as Cirque-lite, all-caps ART. Though a sequence of one performer playing a violin by dragging it across a single string is impressive (he’s better than I ever was with a whole bow and a decade of lessons) Lorenzen struggles to make the drab, all-white-toned and somewhat pretentious show anywhere near as compelling – visually or narratively – as the bold characters and vivid, popping works it borrows running time from.

The time spent with the yarn-spinning acrobats feels like even more like wasteful tire-spinning looking back at the fascinating but underexplored themes and issues woven into the other three stories. Olek’s journey from communist Poland to American artistic freedom – and stardom – is hung out to dry with one mere sentence. The actual ideas behind Tinna’s protest art – the use of white wool, the government, pushing an historically female art form often underappreciated for its perceived domesticity – get equally undercooked.

Only Toshiko is given much time to really parse out and outline her philosophies – yet another reason her segments stand out so much. Otherwise, whether it’s the broader history of the overlooked medium or these new subtly feminist (or not so subtle, re: "Keep calm & eat my c*ck) art rebels, "Yarn" feels tragically thin, settling for unspooling just a few inches of its stories’ yards upon yards of potential. 

There’s at least still some entertainment and amused diversion to have from those few inches, however. When they are briefly able to dig into their artistic motives and philosophies, the ideas about yarn, its role in society and in gender politics, are intriguing. Plus, the works coming from Olek, Tinna and Toshiko are so playfully bright and creative that they can’t help but amuse. That cheery playfulness even sometimes manages to infect Lorenzen’s filmmaking too with occasional colorful animations knitting themselves onto the screen. Sadly all too occasional – and all too outnumbered by monochrome circus interludes, depths desperately unplumbed and poetry breaks that just add forced pretense and weight to an otherwise light and spirited subject.

All of this intertwines together to create a documentary that unfortunately plays less like the bold new artists and art pieces it’s attempting to profile and more like the dusty blankets and sweaters of yarn’s past perceptions: old, merely functional and full of holes. 

"Yarn" = ** out of ****

"Yarn" has a final Milwaukee Film Festival showing on Monday, Oct. 3 at 3:30 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre.