It's hypnotic to see a Rubik's Cube in the hands of a master.
Fingers blur as they spin more than five moves each second. The cube is manipulated faster than its designer ever imagined, generating the harsh staccato of an old typewriter or the distant crackle of small-arms fire.
The current record? A nearly unbelievable 7.08 seconds, set this summer at the Czech Open.
This is the world of "speed-cubing," a small but growing subculture that reflects new popularity for the puzzle discarded in the 1980s by millions of people frustrated that they could finish only one side.
"I wouldn't say the cube is a chick magnet," admits Canadian Matt Walter in the documentary Cubers, which had its premiere last nightat the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax.
The movie, five years in the making, follows a handful of serious cubers through two consecutive world championships. The filmmakers went into their homes to watch them train, talked with sometimes incredulous family members and examined why they were willing to practise hundreds of times a day.
"Because it seems so hard at first, to have complete mastery of it makes you feel very competent," Dan Knights, the American who won the 2003 world championships in Toronto, explained this weekend.
"If you know you're going to do pattern A and pattern B, you can merge them and cut out the middle chunk. And that's when I really feel I'm playing jazz. It's the jazz of math."
Competitors at the top level build their own cubes, fine-tuning the screw adjustment so it spins exactly the way they like. The inner workings are sprayed with lubricant and treated with a hair-dryer. And then they square off in battles to crown the best one-hander, foot-solver and blindfolded player.
The glamour event is the speed competition, where players have to think several moves ahead even as their fingers are spinning at a mad pace. Prize money is limited, though, and glory has until now been restricted to the small community of cubers. As such, it's hard not to see parallels between aficionados in this world and the arcade game masters profiled in last year's The King of Kong.
But Cubers director Richard LeBlanc pointed out that the ranks of top cubers lack the sort of outrageous character, notably the mullet-wearing Billy Mitchell, that anchored Kong.
In fact, speed-cubers appear normal. Although they can spend hours each day practising, always logging their speeds, many also have partners and jobs and other interests. They're arguably no more obsessive than people who train endlessly to better their time in a marathon.
Mr. LeBlanc said he became interested in the bonds in the community, how people who thought they were alone in the world found each other through the Internet and competitions.
"You get these guys together and they're all talking," he said. "They're all cubing and they're all talking."
Mr. LeBlanc wrote and produced the short comedy Lipstick, wrote Counting The Days, a finalist in the Atlantic Film Festival's Scripts Outloud contest in 2003, and appeared briefly in the film Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.
His latest documentary reveals that speed-cubers are mostly male, tending to be good at math and often working with computers. But while they may be introverts, even geeks, no one could call them nerds.
Mr. Knights is a well-spoken former math teacher doing a doctorate in Colorado. The 29-year-old talks about similarities between cubing and meditation and says he saw a hypnotist to help clear his mind for competition.
You can't help but notice, though, that he wears an inspirational-type black bracelet etched with the word "nihilism." And his somewhat adversarial relationship with the cube comes out when he talks about the rush he gets from figuring out a shortcut while solving the puzzle.
Mr. Walter is another of the competitors followed by the documentary. He's now a 21-year-old studying mechanical engineering and robotics in Kitchener, Ont. With his floppy hair and aw-shucks smile he resembles Mark Wahlberg's character in Boogie Nights, before the coke took hold.
He said he first picked up a Rubik's Cube in 2003, after reading about it in a book on how to improve memory. It took him two years to get to world-class speeds, practising hundreds of hours.
"Nowadays people don't have to take as long as me, they can just go on YouTube and see exactly how to do it," he said on the weekend.
Mr. LeBlanc would disagree. He had promised his subjects that he'd learn to solve it by the time the movie aired. Only hours before last night's premiere he was still struggling. But he'd finished one side.***
By the numbers
Celebrity actress Zsa Zsa Gabor launched the Rubik's Cube in America with a Hollywood party on May 5, 1980.
The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian Erno Rubik, a professor of architecture and design in Budapest.
It requires a minimum of 22 twists to solve.
Manufacturer Ideal Toys was originally going to call it the Gordian Knot.
There are some 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (or 43 quintillion) different colour combination arrangements to a 3x3x3 cube.
It took the inventor of the Rubik's Cube one month to first solve his puzzle.
The ultimate collectable of 1981 in Britain was a Rubik's Cube showing Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.
One of the youngest Cube solvers ever back in 1981 was seven-year-old Lars-Erik Anderson of Norway.
A football game in Connecticut was delayed when one player, Bob Blake, failed to take the field. He was found in the locker room playing with the Cube.
More than 300 million Rubik's Cubes have been sold worldwide. If all the cubes were placed on top of each other they would reach the top of Mount Everest. Twice.
At the height of the Rubik's craze in the mid-1980s, it was estimated that one-fifth of the world's population had played with a Cube.
The Cube has inspired fashion, architecture, music, films, plays and political speeches. There is also a dedicated art movement known as "Rubikubism."
The biggest Cube in the world, on display in Knoxville, Tenn., is three metres tall and weighs over 500 kilograms.
International "speed-cubing" championships have been held regularly since 2003.
Oliver Moore