Kumaré, an Indian guru who walks barefoot and carries a staff and a small rattan suitcase, preaches that he is an illusion, and he is — he's actually Vikram Gandhi, a Columbia graduate from New Jersey who was raised religious but turned skeptic just as America went yoga-mad. Dismayed by the public's well-documented gullibility, he adopts his grandmother's old-country singsong and gets himself booked at a Phoenix yoga studio teaching made-up rituals and fake moves. Gandhi feigns astonishment when people fall for his act, but his greatest demand of his followers is to make them do yard work for a whole hour. Eventually he punks 14 seekers, including a death-penalty attorney and a recovering addict, all, Gandhi insists, to their betterment. Kumaré might be a Sacha Baron Cohen stunt, but Gandhi drowns his padded documentary with a voiceover that is all Morgan Spurlock, deaf to its self-aggrandizement.
