Bill Moore is what you might call a televangelist for big dicks.
At AdvancedYou, an anti-aging aesthetic clinic specializing in “biohacking and wellness treatments” that he runs out of a Dallas strip mall, Moore offers men a unique form of personal salvation through PhalloFill. It’s a penis enlargement procedure that, while not able to add inches in length, involves injecting hydrocyanic acid dermal filler for increased girth.
In Daniel Lombroso’s new documentary Manhood, in theaters this week, the director tracks this desperate quest for sexual adequacy among men who find themselves struggling with self-worth and the crisis of modern masculinity.
As headlines about the male loneliness epidemic were making the rounds a few years ago, which Lombroso felt were “sort of thin and maybe navel-gazy,” he decided he wanted to tell a more “propulsive story” about what was going on with men in America. Around that time, he also started hearing more about penile enhancement and began talking to some of the practitioners offering it as well as the men getting it, including Moore, who invited him to Texas.
Moore fancies himself something of a cosmetic revolutionary. He was among the first wellness professionals in Dallas to use platelet-rich-plasma for hair replacement. In Manhood, his goals remain unwavering: to make his patented penis enlargement technique as commonplace as Botox.
You could say Lombroso, a former editorial producer for The Atlantic and The New Yorker, has a metaphorical hard-on for subcultural deep dives. His first documentary, White Noise, followed white-nationalist groups for three years from Donald Trump’s 2016 win until the end of his first term.
With Manhood, Lombroso wanted to understand what was driving men to get on the operating table. During visits to Moore’s clinic, he met men with unique stories: a megachurch pastor; border patrol agents; a man suffering from brain cancer. David, a 24-year-old gay OnlyFans star shunned by his religious mother, who visits AdvancedYou following a botched procedure, and Ruben, an out-of-work father of five who moonlights as a stand-up comedian and listens to the Joe Rogan podcast, are cast as the central figures in the film, along with Moore.
“I was just like, this is fucking crazy that these guys are really eager to tell Bill, and were really eager to tell me, what was going on in their life,” Lombroso says. To his surprise, an overwhelming majority—he estimates around 75 percent—of the men undergoing the procedure were straight. “People for some reason make the assumption that it wouldn’t be that division, but it’s mostly straight men,” whom he notes were “conservative-leaning.”