It's sometimes said that experiencing the movie business with the chill of failure is like drinking warm Coca-Cola: now you know what it actually tastes like. This deliciously insightful documentary from director James Toback – who made Fingers (1978) and Black and White (1999) – is all about the massive sub-surface icebergs of desperate, painful effort that lie beneath the peaks of the cinema world. Basically: the agony of finding the money. The location is the Cannes film festival, which is where I first saw it earlier this year.

A fly-on-the-wall camera follows Toback around the hubbub of Cannes in 2012, ostensibly trying to raise cash for a new movie called Last Tango in Tikrit, a sexually explicit allegory about post-Iraq disillusion. With him is his putative star, the funny and charismatic Alec Baldwin, who, like Toback, has often had his heart broken by the film business. Like Toback he has been repeatedly seduced and abandoned by this gorgeous and deadly world, and keeps coming back for more. More to the point, six years in the smash-hit TV show 30 Rock has made Baldwin a recognisable star again, and now he wants to realise that celeb capital; he wants to make it back on to the big screen, in the big league. Toback and Baldwin know that they are not young any more, but they also know that they're good. There's no false modesty. Surely a hit should be possible, or at least a movie, when so many awful ones are getting made – and Toback is confident he will make a good one.

So they tour around talking to the money guys, interviewing actors such as Jessica Chastain and Ryan Gosling about the biz, and also the big players such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux. It's a terrifically smart and enjoyable film, with a tinge of sadness in its cinephilia: both men are wounded by the movies. Underlying everything is a fear of failure and of death. The sequence in which Toback asks all these movie stars if they are ready for death is hilarious and startling: for some, it is clearly the first time they have ever thought about it. If Last Tango in Tikrit never works out for Toback and Baldwin, so what? They'll always have Cannes.