Fox on top form in this no-pity party
Still: A Michael J Fox Movie
94 mins, cert 15 ★★★★✩
WATCHING the first five minutes of this documentary about Michael J Fox, you may be tempted to feel sorry for the Canadian megastar who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s aged 29. We see the Back to the Future actor, now 61, skittering haphazardly along a street; then, attempting to respond to the friendly words of a fan going into a spin that leaves him splayed on the ground. But Fox has no time for your pity — what soon becomes clear is that he is after respect and wants to make you laugh. Bullseye!
Archive footage shows him conquering audiences with ad libs on the Eighties sit-com Family Ties. As a teenager, he was mentally and physically agile. In the present day, his mind is still racing. His mission — to put us in the shoes of the young man who owned fast cars and dated famous women but wasn’t as happy as he looked.
The picture he paints of LA’s entertainment industry is warts and all. He was the victim of a punishing schedule that prioritised profit over mental health; he was part of a pecking order that encouraged celebrities (especially male ones) to party themselves into oblivion and lord it over aides, family and lovers. The point he’s making is that he became ill, but Hollywood’s been sick forever.
Fox, who doubles as the movie’s narrator, is nothing if not self-deprecating; he insists Parkinson’s (which can cause facial muscles to freeze), improved his acting because it curbed his tendency to gurn. Fox has written four memoirs (most recently, No Time Like the
Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality). If you read any or all of them, you will know that he is a dab hand at recycling gags. The project shifts into another gear when film-maker Davis Guggenheim asks tricky questions and Fox, staring into the camera with eyes as beseeching as they are furtive, reacts in real time.
The monologues are great, but it is the back and forth (including the banter between Fox and his delightfully unglossy family) that makes Still unmissable. Fox will forever be synonymous with the whizzy DeLorean DMC12. Yet “fancy” isn’t his style. It is fitting that the actor, searching for a metaphor to describe his agitated state of mind (as he sits before us, counting the seconds till his painkillers kick in), opts for, “I’m waiting for the bus... Now I’m on the bus!”
The biggest of many surprises is that Fox’s everyman image wasn’t public relations guff. He’s one of us, the comedian next door with blistering insights into what it means to be blessed.
• In cinemas and on Apple TV+