“Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here,” a documentary about the Ukrainian-born artists, seems as labyrinthine as the fake museum they installed at Daria Zhukov’s Garage for Contemporary Culture in Moscow in September 2008. It is, though, carefully structured around the couple’s return to the city for only the first time since Ilya left in 1987. It presents him as the visionary artist, who retains the paranoia of a man scarred by the experiences of growing up under Stalinism and who is full of trepidation about the trip, and his wife (12 years his junior and thus a daughter of the post-Stalinist phase) as the confident and cosmopolitan force behind their work.

Directed by the art critic and Ilya biographer Amei Wallach, the movie starts with the Kabakovs’ arrival amid paparazzi and celebs at the epic 2008 exhibition (which also occupied the Pushkin Museum and the Winzavo Art Centre), and then zooms back eight months to their home on Long Island to contemplate their relationship as emigrés to Russia. It’s here that Ilya offers his tripartite philosophy of loserdom, which is based on the principle of being born into the world, of being a psychological failure despite his success, and of being a Russian (the clincher).

He clearly still hates Russia, or at least its past, so was unwilling to return to what he perceived as its negative space when asked to show in Moscow. He and Emilia decided to take up the invitation spontaneously, despite Emilia having to raise the money and talk to potential exhibitors while keeping Ilya quiet, in case, having “been silent for 55 years of his life,” he insulted them, which, on one occasion, he did. “Everyone lived as if under an axe,” he recalls of his upbringing. The romanticism of the Communist utopia was maintained while the people lived with “the repulsive, dangerous, and disgusting” truth of a system that “never worked”: the crucial tension that informs his irony-laden work.

Ilya possibly felt he had a score to settle with his old country, no matter that he had no expectations his work would be understood there. The Moscow show became an attractive proposition because Zhukov, an oligarch’s daughter and a socialite, offered them the opportunity to launch her new space at Konstantin Melnikov’s Constructivist Autobus landmark, briefly glimpsed as it was when Dziga Vertov filmed it for 1929’s “Man with a Movie Camera.”

Wallach’s interview with Zhukov spirals off into a mini-travelogue on post-Soviet Moscow life. (An update might have included the fact that she and her partner, Roman Abramovich, paid an alleged $60 million to acquire some 40 Kabakov pre-1987 installations and paintings earlier this year.) Excerpts are read from Ilya’s mother’s 1981 memoir recounting her poverty and hunger in 1920s and 1930s Ukraine, the source of one of Ilya’s most personal installations. While Ilya’s in Moscow, Emilia takes a nostalgic side-trip to their old hometown of Dnipropetrovsk, where she reveals that her grandfather and Ilya’s father were related. The latter abandoned his wife and son, earning Ilya’s lifelong hatred. When the Wehrmacht invaded, they fled east to Samarkand.

Ilya explains how one night he and a friend broke into the relocated Leningrad Art Academy there to see some paintings of nude. Feigning an interest in art when he was caught by a “crone,” he was invited to show the instructors some drawings. He did a few military sketches and was accepted. As a student he moved on to Zagorsk and Moscow, but his devoted mother was not allowed to live in Moscow and was forced to live in toilets in Zagorsk. The movie cuts in Ilya supervising an installation of a family living room combined with open lavatories. Emilia mentions how he told the builders to make the walls "sloppy" to replicate Soviet workmanship.

The movie subsequently describes Ilya’s evolution as a well-paid official illustrator of children’s books whose undercover work as a serious artist — the camera climbs the rickety stairs to his old attic studio in Moscow — brought him friends and colleagues in Oleg Vassiliev and Erik Bulatov, leading to the birth of the Experimental Group and Moscow Conceptualism. Vassiliev, who died this year, is one of the film’s most insightful interviewees.

“Enter Here” has some annoying tics: an unnecessary tendency to superimpose images on top of each other as Ilya and Emilia tell their stories; a subtitle that crawls up the side of the frame and upside down across the top to suggest the flies that Ilya painted to represent the Russian soul as a “dump.” Its masterstroke, however, is in its explication of how the Kabakovs’ dreamlike work sardonically evokes the illusory nature of the Soviet myth of equality and plenty.