Bryan Johnson, the wealthy tech entrepreneur at the center of Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, is on a mission to “neutralize” his aging process. Every day he performs an over-regulated personal care routine that will, in theory, help him maintain the physical condition of a person much younger than him. (He’s now 47.) This all-too-friendly documentary, promoted on Johnson’s website, offers the more familiar reverse feeling of having 90 minutes of your life taken away from you. When it’s over, you’ll be older, a development that the film gives the impression that it’s accelerating.

A big part of Johnson’s protocol involves taking ordinary medical advice (eating healthy, getting enough sleep) to the extreme. He lives by an algorithm that gives his body what it needs, when it needs it, regardless of what his mind tells him he wants. When people panic at the thought of giving up free will, it’s a “knee-jerk reaction,” he says. He adds: “Consciousness is desperate to stay in power.”

If turning off mental functions sounds like advice more suited to a cult than a wellness plan, critics contend that this type of belief system is closer to what Johnson promotes. To be honest, what he’s doing to his body doesn’t look great either. He tells Talmage, his son, that he will take 130 tablets in a day. Talmage and Johnson’s father Richard take part in a plasma exchange, which the documentary eerily portrays as an exercise in intergenerational bonding. Johnson flies to Honduras for experimental gene therapy.

The flaw in his strategy is that combining so many different treatments is not only potentially dangerous, but also makes it impossible to know what works. “It’s not science,” says Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, a medical professor at Harvard who is interviewed in the documentary. “It’s just attention.” And the director, Chris Smith, doesn’t really explain how unnerving it is to watch such a willing oversharer, especially one who peddles supplements, merchandise and even brand-name olive oil. If Johnson is, as his critics claim, more of a salesman than a medical visionary, then Smith is simply supporting his pitch.

The director has worked with monomaniacal camera subjects before; His most popular film, “American Movie” (1999), centers on DIY filmmaker Mark Borchardt with an irrepressible urge to pursue his silly vision. But if there’s something light-hearted about Johnson, who devotes an extraordinary portion of his life to obsessive self-surveillance, then Smith hasn’t captured it.

Faced with the problem of humanizing a man who wants to betray a fundamental aspect of human existence, Smith settles for a banal father-son arc. Johnson, who has left the Mormon Church, has complicated relationships with his family, and Talmage, considered the child closest to him, is a high school senior. Even an anti-aging guru can’t stop his kid from going to college.

Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Netflix.