New York- When I mentioned that I was going to review a one-woman show called “My Year of Porn,” colleagues expressed strong interest. But once they were told that the show is about a journalist’s year of research, making a documentary about the pornographic-film business, rather than an actress’s year of participation in the films, they shrugged and changed the subject.

In fact Cole Kazdin [pictured] does quite a good job of making her story compelling. Ms. Kazdin is an attractive young woman with great hair and an alto-perky personality, so it’s easy to see why filmmakers she met suggested, while she was hanging around the set taking notes, that she remove her clothes and get in there and do a scene or two. An actor whose nom de cinéma is Rock Hard, she says, found her particularly appealing and surprised her with a kiss one day, but that was as far as it went.

“My Year of Porn,” smoothly directed by Ivanna Cullinan, is at risk of being a one-joke routine: Isn’t it funny when people take sex so matter-of-factly? An actress greets her co-star across the room with a big smile and a wave, saying, “Hi! I’m making love with you today!” (The comment is, as one might guess, slightly paraphrased.)

Luckily, Ms. Kazdin brings a wry tone to her anecdotes, many of which are too graphic to repeat here. She also portrays a variety of eccentric but thoroughly believable characters. They include a 73-year-old, 400-pound filmmaker who announces “AIDS is a gays’ and junkies’ disease” and considers himself the most feminist director in the business; Sinammon Summers, a starlet whom Ms. Kazdin decides to study closely (she “will be Graybeard to my Jane Goodall”); a New York woman who can never learn how to hang up her cellphone; and a production assistant who is the spitting image of the serial cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer.

The research was, apparently, an educational experience for Ms. Kazdin. She is told that the best male porn stars are ex-marines. She concludes that actors in porn films are really bad at talking dirty (one woman’s ad-lib – “Oh, yeah, I can feel it in my cervix” – doesn’t quite do the job). And finally, Ms. Kazdin admits, “Porn is seedy.”

In the end, she and her associates, in trying to make a documentary about pornography, realize they have simply made pornography. It’s even “clinical and badly lit,” she says.

But the larger problem is that, after the project is over, Ms. Kazdin can’t get the subject out of her mind. Whenever she tries to do yoga to relax, every posture seems inescapably sexual. And maybe she spent a little too much time with people in the industry. Now, she says, “I call everybody sweetie, and I mean it.”