Sean Ono Lennon’s doc on this fashion house has more fashion and less depth.

You can see how stylishly bizarre the clothing material is in the doc “threeASFOUR: Full Circle.” There are spiral shapes like something out of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” some that look like tentacles, and all of it is colorful, organic, biomorphic, and resonating with the beauty of nature. So we can easily tell the movie has a strong fashion sense.

For those of you unfamiliar with the threeASFOUR as I am, it is a New York fashion house with the splicing of innovation and craftsmanship and the focus on natural geometries. They began in 2005, and the artists were Gabriel Asfour, Angela Donhauser, Ali Gil, and Kai Khune. And they became threeASFOUR, when Kai left to pursue his own label. Now a documentary on them sounds fresh and riveting, and the directors are Sean Ono Lennon (son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but you knew that already) and Brian Gonzalez (also the cinematographer). So a movie within the fashion world and made by fresh talents should be stylish, and it is. It just lacks the spirit and essence to really take us into the lives of threeASFOUR.

Here are the backgrounds of the three artists. Gabriel is the Lebanese son of Palestinians, and grew up in Lebanon’s civil wars. Angela is a Tajik raised in Germany when it was part of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. and Adi is an Israeli Jew, who took family trips in South Sinai before Egypt secured the area. Each of them talks about their backgrounds and the wars they were caught in. Even Angela was called a “Nazi” in kindergarten. But all of them are able to settle their differences and backgrounds and collaborate very well. That’s how they put all their hearts into their clothes.

This doc shows them working and dealing with financial problems with their studio apartment, while preparing for a major fashion show. This is when we really get to see the kaleidoscope of colors from the costumes. But even then, Gabriel, Angela, and Adi need to figure out their next steps.

“threeASFOUR: Full Circle” wants to speak about the backgrounds and cultures of the three artists and how they display them in their clothes. It allows Gabriel, Angela, and Adi to speak about their lives-where they come from, who they are, and how they live their lives. And with threeASFOUR, they’re all able to see the serenity of freedom and the gift of designing clothes. But we just don’t get the kind of story to delve deeper into their lives. It ends up being upstaged by the spiral fashions, which seems to go all over the place, and the more it does that, the less interesting the narrative gets.

I guess you could say I’m part of the fashion police when reviewing this doc, but I needed a little more life into these three. They need to resonate with the strong fashion sense presented here, because these are some of the coolest designs I have ever seen a human being wear. You know the saying: “Clothes Make the Man,” but it doesn’t make everything here.

Now Playing at the Film Forum in NYC