Currently available on DVD "Client 9 : The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"

If you have followed the strange tale of Eliot Spitzer you get the sense that the former governor of New York must have read his share of Greek classics. In Alex Gibney’s documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Spitzer says that hubris played a role in his stumble. Like Peter Elkind’s recent book, Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, the movie quotes from a 2005 speech in which Spitzer jokingly describes a T-shirt that he was given with “Hubris is terminal” on it. After being exposed, Spitzer told an aide, “Welcome to a Greek tragedy.”

More like a depressing lesson in power politics, though that’s probably not what Gibney was shooting for. While its full title suggests that Client 9 is about the highs and lows in one powerful man’s life, the movie is more rightly an anatomy of political gamesmanship at a high level. Coming seven months after the publication of Rough Justice, it is also the fruit of a cross-media partnership. Previously, Elkind helped write a book about Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room, which Gibney turned into a movie. This time they chased the Spitzer story separately while “sharing ideas and information along the way.”

Gibney blends his ingredients — talking-head interviews, photographs, news reports, shots of a glittering, jewel-like New York — together in expert fashion, though much of it is familiar, including to readers of The New York Times, which, on March 10, 2008, broke the story that Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring. Two days later the governor — who as the state’s attorney general had overseen the 2004 bust of a prostitution ring — resigned from office, apologizing for not living “up to what was expected of me.” For two years the 54th governor of New York had been a client of one of those high-end enterprises, euphemistically called escort services, that offered the “girlfriend experience” for $1,000 (and up) an hour.

The movie spends some time checking into the prostitution angle and even tosses in some of the details recounted in Elkind’s book, including the assertion that Spitzer hired three women in a single day, which he denied. Somewhat unusually for a documentary, Gibney hired an actress to recite lines from interviews he conducted with Spitzer’s favorite playmate, a chatty woman who did not want to appear on camera. The use of actors in nonfiction film dates back at least to The March of Time, newsreel-like shorts that were shown in movie theaters starting in 1935. But it’s a distraction here.

That’s particularly true because, for Gibney, the juiciest parts of this story weren’t the explicit, sometimes banal details, like Spitzer’s famous black socks. No, the good stuff, as far as Gibney’s movie and Elkind’s book theorize, involves the power brokers who — enraged by Spitzer’s activism as attorney general, specifically in his hard-charging capacity as the Sheriff of Wall Street — might have had something to do with his downfall. (Although the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time has indicated that they didn’t.) Spitzer had a lot of enemies by the time he became governor and quickly picked up more. One of those was Joseph L. Bruno, the longtime former Republican majority leader of the New York State Senate, who some in the Spitzer administration had unsuccessfully gone after in the scandal called Troopergate.

Whether he’s hitting a bag or yammering in news reports, Bruno, a former boxer and notorious political pugilist, makes a colorful, entertaining interview subject, as does the strategist Roger Stone. Both men are important stops on the trail of bread crumbs that Gibney persuasively sprinkles and that leads to Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman of A.I.G., and that snakes over to Kenneth G. Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot and a former director of the New York Stock Exchange. As attorney general, Spitzer sued Greenberg and A.I.G., and named Langone in a suit for his part in the compensation package paid to Richard A. Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, whose $139.5 million haul became emblematic of Wall Street greed.

(Last May, Bruno was sentenced to two years in prison on federal corruption charges after receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a businessman who wanted help from the Legislature. He remains free, and the case is before a federal appeals court.)

Gibney and Elkind are not alone in floating the theory of conspiratorial payback. In March 2008, in a syndicated piece titled “Did Wall Street Nail Spitzer?,” the left-wing columnist Alexander Cockburn noted that in an interview with CNBC (which Gibney also samples) Langone seemed to have intimate knowledge of Spitzer’s activity: “I know for sure he went himself to a post office and bought $2,800 worth of mail orders to send to the hooker,” he said, adding, “I know somebody who was standing in back of him in line.” Those swayed by the argument in Client 9 that some of the rich and powerful whom Spitzer crusaded against might have exploited his stupidity should find all this enthralling. Others might just remember the hubris.