The new HBO documentary "Con Man" (Tuesday, March 19, at 7 p.m.), directed by Jesse Moss, deals with another college student grappling with identity issues. "How could this happen here?" is exactly the question Princeton University asked itself after discovering that a sterling student, track star and Ivy Club member named Alexi Indris Santana was actually a 30-year-old named James Hogue, who had applied for admission from prison in Utah.

There's been a rash of "Logan's Run"-style stories about 30-year-olds claiming to be teenagers in order to gain access to some aspect of life they missed out on the first time around. The latest of these, Emily White's story about Treva Throneberry, the 29-year-old who reinvented herself as 16-year-old Brianna Stewart, which appeared in the March 10 New York Times Magazine, probably takes the nut cake. Even from jail -- where she landed on charges of defrauding the state and the foster care system -- Throneberry refuses to let go of her pigtailed 19-year-old self. A few years ago, there was the famous story of 19-year-old "Felicity" writer Riley Weston, who turned out to be a 32-year-old frustrated actor-turned-writer named Kimberlee Kramer (nee Seaman). As the third installment in a bizarre series, Hogue's story (the subject of a New Yorker story in September) makes the trend official. Eighteen is the new 30. If you're crazy. Or desperate.

Moss's interest in Hogue's life dates to 1985, when the two of them attended Palo Alto High School, in California. At the time, Hogue was 26 and going by the name of Jay Mitchell Huntsman. The film begins when it's discovered that Hogue is not, in fact, the San Diego-born, Nevada commune-raised Swedish orphan he made himself out to be. (Hogue was scrupulous about records -- he assumed the identity of a deceased infant born the year he wanted to have been born -- but was consistently a bit too flamboyant about his back story.) Instead, he was a 26-year-old college dropout from Kansas City, Kan. Five years after Hogue's abrupt disappearance from Palo Alto, a high-school track teammate recognized him while attending a meet at Princeton.

Despite Hogue's many deceptions, the people who knew him at Princeton appear to be fascinated by him. More than one acquaintance calls him a genius. Asks one classmate, "Why not just reprimand him and leave him alone?" (Hogue was getting A's and B's at the time he was discovered.) Says another, "It makes sense that this drama would play out on a college campus, a place where people come to reinvent themselves." And yet, as his public defender points out, joining the track team was a good way to garner unwanted attention. "He must have believed he was who he said he was, that he was living this life."

The irony of Hogue's situation is that he was living that life. As his (actual) high school friend Keith Mark points out, "Jim Hogue beat those boys on the track. Jim took those entrance exams. He did all the class work. He got the offer to be in the [Ivy] club." As the public defender puts it, Princeton got taken, and didn't like it.

Hogue's efforts to reinvent himself via an exotic international background and an elite education seem pretty specific, but he never articulates his stance on class identity and its relation to opportunity as well as Mark does. "I'm amused that he pulled the wool over Princeton," Mark says. "If he would have pulled the wool over Northern Iowa, I wouldn't be so amused."

Instead, Hogue presents his choices as theater ("It was like being in a play, I was a character"), as redemption ("Because I want to start all over again ... without the burdens of my past"), as pathology ("If I were a drug addict or alcoholic there would have been millions of tedious AA meetings, but this is a different form of addiction not recognized as having a remedy. Having a different moral standard than what's recognized as the correct one.")

Moss finally catches up to Hogue in the Colorado hinterlands, where Hogue is disappointed to discover you still can't hide from your past. ("You can see Colorado Springs and Santa Fe. I wish it were more isolated than this. It's a little disappointing.") Despite Hogue's many creepy evasions, his story plays as infinitely sadder than the predictable television drama of Shepard's story, which is tragic.

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