Directed By Davis Guggenheim

Starring – Michael J. Fox, Danny Irizarry, Hannah Galway

The Plot – Follows the life of beloved actor and advocate Michael J. Fox, exploring his personal and professional triumphs and travails, and what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease.

Rated R for adult language

STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie — Official Trailer | Apple TV+ – YouTube

POSITIVES

Guggenheim’s insightful look into the life and career of this beloved pop culture icon is an unflinchingly sincere and poignantly profound experience that creatively blurs the line between film and reality in ways that transfer seamlessly to the integrity and entertainment factor of its presentation. For starters, the film’s unique touch of illustrating a narrative from Michael’s own perspective, with his own overhanging narration from the actor audibly framed in real time, is mirrored visually with inserts of scenes from his own movies and shows, giving the documentary an unfurling effect of storytelling that actually does make this feel like a film in every sense of the picture’s title. In addition to this, the production spares no expense in fleshing out the essence of the many time periods that Michael’s story takes us through, with stock footage of Los Angeles’ nightlife, decade heavy pop music favorites, and no shortage of behind the scenes press coverage that only further supplants us into the aforementioned timely enveloping that supplants these pocketed moments of warming nostalgia to only add to the indulgence of getting to spend 96 minutes with this cherished figure who has since been shadowed by such a debilitating condition. On that aspect, the film also surprisingly maintains a rich balance of tonal influences that work terrifically and feel earned within the evolution of the narrative, despite many difficult and revealing instances for Michael’s now daily routine that could’ve saturated the experience. Most of what helps with this in check is Michael’s own unshakeably caustic charisma, which feels like the lone familiar entity that has remained unchanged by such a devastating diagnosis, but so much more lends itself to Guggenheim’s masterful direction, which keeps this from ever feeling like a wet blanket of melodramatic masochism, teaching us honesty in the challenges that Fox faces, but never in ways that constrict the integrity of the project from the confines of the enchanting spirit that it centers around. As for Fox, his ability to confront the depression, alcoholism and cinematic backlash that spawned from a combination of his untimely diagnosis and underwhelming successors to “Back to the Future”, is therapeutically integral to the way he approaches the project, affording it the freedom of exploration to Fox’s vulnerability and internal demons that we obviously never experience in film or TV. Michael’s look dead into the camera is most vital in this perspective, affording the engagement an immersive transcendence that not only brings out the honesty and fearlessness of Fox to finally get his story out there, but also essentially makes for an inspiring experience that he constantly feels in control of, despite situational adversities that would convey otherwise. The documentary remains educational and entertaining throughout the entirety of its easily-accessibly run time, and in turn crafts a celebration to the 61-year-old icon, who regretfully realizes that his days in film might very well be behind him, but his energy and insatiable appetite for life is the driving force to continuously keep moving, one day at a time.

NEGATIVES

As for issues with the film, the editing schemes of the interview pieces with Fox, now in real time, grow taxing and tedious the longer the film persists, removing far too much of the organic fearlessness of the engagement that it repeatedly contradicts. I can understand that the intention is to present Michael as a man not confined by a condition, and to make him come across as the frenetic firestorm that many of us grew up adoring, but it feels artificially intelligent, cutting and pasting a bunch of little scenes to make one big one, and in turn drawing more consciousness to the debilitating nature of his condition because of the way it continuously works against him. This is thankfully only an aspect of the interviewing sequences, but because much of the film’s second half storytelling resides in and around Fox in real time, it grows all the more evident and distracting the longer the film persists, proving how difficult all of this is for him, but for all of the wrong reasons. Beyond this, my only other slight problem with the experience was in the lack of corresponding guests to the narrative of the storytelling, which leaves it feeling a bit small scale to the magnitude of Fox’s inspiring legacy. Michael’s grasp on the feature is obviously integral, granting a first person perspective to his own internal triumphs and conflicts, but some outisder perspective from friends or family would outline a bigger discussion, in turn inscribing meaningful depth to the various conflicts that could use complexity to the one-dimensional degree of angled storytelling frequently conveyed.

OVERALL
“Still: A Michael J. Fox Film” is an unforgettably inspiring story of resiliency that doesn’t dwell on the sadness of adversities that are out of anybody’s control. With Guggenheim’s imaginative direction eliciting a unique measure of visual storytelling taking us through Fox’s rise to super-stardom, the film garners an element of introspective immersiveness that brings us closer to Fox than ever before, with an experience that like Fox, never stays in place for a single life-changing second.

My Grade: 8/10 or B+