Watch. "Recycle." Tonight.

Here's a pretty good test of whether you live in a good PBS market or not -- is your station carrying "Recycle," the absorbing slice-of-life film about life in a Jordanian household?

It's airing 9 p.m. locally on KCPT as part of the PBS documentary series "Independent Lens." Check your local listings for it.

Here's my review. Scroll down further for a video interview with the director.

Last year, I saw two films at the Sundance Film Festival that examined Islamic extremism.

One was a cartoonish vehicle for “Super Size Me” star Morgan Spurlock called “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?” There was a long line at the press screening, and a publicist handed out milk cartons with the al-Qaida leader’s face printed on the side.

The film was held together with visual gimmicks and Spurlock’s inescapable narration as he and his crew traveled the globe, ostensibly looking for bin Laden. The film should’ve been called “Where in the World Is Morgan Spurlock?”

And then there was “Recycle.” Going into this film’s sparsely attended screening, I’d been told only that it was a documentary about a scrap collector who lived in the same neighborhood in Zarqa, Jordan, that produced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the infamous Iraqi insurgent.

“Recycle,” as you will see at 9 tonight on KCPT, is told without narration or graphics, other than subtitles. On the surface the story is exceedingly mundane: Abu Ammar, the film’s central character, spends his days collecting and recycling cardboard with his boys and his nights drinking tea and discussing politics and Islam with friends.

Thinking about these two films, I found Spurlock’s effort entertaining but all too typical of an American tendency to present the world the way a travel agent would: as a hopscotch of scenic vistas with peculiar inhabitants best suited to drive-by encounters.

“Recycle” is not “entertaining” in that sense, but its deceptively ordinary premise hardly prepares you for the absorbing experience that follows, one that takes you into Abu Ammar’s world so deeply that it almost becomes claustrophobic and offers some insight into how the unthinkable becomes plausible.

Soft-spoken and tender-hearted — he often lets his youngest boy sit on his lap and “drive” the jalopy around Zarqa in their endless search for cardboard — Abu Ammar dreams of being an Islamic scholar. He has been working on a book about jihad for some 20 years. In an interview at Sundance last year, the filmmaker, Mahmoud al Massad, who is also from Zarqa, told me that Abu Ammar’s text, which has yet to be published, is “important.”

But because of the country where he lives and the culture that shapes him, Abu Ammar’s options are severely constrained. Unable to please his father and apparently lacking business skills, he struggles to provide for an impossibly large clan of eight children and two wives. (Almost no women appear on camera, and then they are usually clad head to toe in black burkas.)

So he takes risky assignments abroad for money. He was a driver for Mujahedeen leaders in Afghanistan. He disappears midway through the filming of “Recycle” to deliver 58 cars to Iraq, a dangerous task. Even at home he lives in some peril. Jordanian authorities keep an eye on him, and he has been known to get called in for questioning.

There is a scene toward the end I don’t want to say too much about, except that it involves trying to get some milk out of another man’s camel and that it encapsulates all of the daily humiliations Abu Ammar is forced to endure because of his low station in life.

Al Massad said it took a year to earn the trust of his subject and gain the access that made “Recycle” possible. He assured me that there are many like Abu Ammar in Zarqa, people who “have a different view of war, of jihad, that is not extremist.”

Which makes it all the more haunting that an ordinary, decent, religious man like Abu Ammar could go to work for some of the world’s most nihilistic terror organizations.