Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind’, An HBO Documentary About The Life Of The Manic Comic Legend

If Robin Williams’ death in 2014 still throws you for a loop four years later — it certainly does with us — then it may be hard to watch the new HBO documentary Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. But if you also remember how funny and lighting-fast Williams was most of the time, then this movie may be just what you need to break up your summer doldrums. Is the movie exceedingly sad, hilariously funny, or both?

ROBIN WILLIAMS: COME INSIDE MY MIND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In a few words, this is the first documentary about the life of Robin Williams. Filmmaker Marina Zenovich starts from the beginning, his isolated childhood as an only child in Detroit to his high school and college years in the Bay Area, through his years at Julliard, the beginnings of his standup career at the Comedy Store in L.A., his breakout stardom in Mork and Mindy, all the way through to his suicide in 2014.

Through all of it, Zenovich tries to find what drove Williams to be such a manic presence, seemingly always “on,” even if the audience was just friends. She also explores his lightning fast mind, his at times lonely existence, and the circumstances leading to his death. Interspersed with interviews with college-era buddies, his first wife Valerie Velardi, his son Zak Williams and showbiz friends and colleagues like Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Steve Martin and more is archival footage from Williams’ standup performances, talk show interviews, and hilarious TV and movie outtakes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Zenovich has done a number of movies that delve into the lives of complicated celebrities, like Richard Pryor: Omit The Logic and Roman Polanski: Wanted And Desired, and the follows the same themes in Come Inside My Mind. What made this person tick? And how did it affect their career and the people around them?

Performance Worth Watching: We were particularly intrigued by the presence of Velardi, who admittedly never spoke to the press when she was married to Williams. She talks about the common narrative that Williams cheated on her with their nanny (his eventual second wife Marsha Garces), and how a) that’s not how it went, as they were already split up, b) she was no longer the nanny, and c) the narrative perpetuated because she never spoke to the press.

Memorable Dialogue: Crystal recounting how he bonded with Williams over fatherhood, and the voicemails Williams would leave him playing different characters. As we said earlier, he was always “on,” even when the audience was just Billy Crystal’s answering machine.

Also, here’s how Lewis Black described Williams, with whom he co-starred in Man of the Year and toured war zones with as part of a USO detail: “He was like the light that never knew how to turn itself off.”

Single Best Shot: A Mork and Mindy outtake where Dawber notices that he looks awful, and Williams replies, “Because I feel like shit, that’s why! I’m not even looking at you, I’m looking at the back of my mind, thinking, ‘There’s gotta be another line! Someone back there send another line forward!” Dawber and the audience are laughing their asses off, because even when he’s severely hungover, Williams’ mind worked way faster than anyone else’s did.

Our Take: Zenovich does a great job of taking the complex life of such a famous (but not well-known, if you know what we mean) person such as Williams and examine it in the span of two hours. It does its job and reveals details about Williams that the viewer may not have known, and gives a bit of an insight into his career that peeled the onion of Williams’ process just enough to get new insights into how and why he did what he did.

Williams’ last decade, pockmarked by divorce, a declining career, rehab for a drinking problem, open-heart surgery, his Parkinson’s diagnosis, and the fact that he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia after his death, doesn’t quite get the in-depth treatment the rest of his life does.

Williams’ death affected a number of people and changed the way many think of suicide, with the Lewy body dementia diagnosis changing the narrative of “suicide = depression” that had infiltrated social media in his death’s immediate aftermath. This is where some insight from his widow, Susan Schneider, his younger kids Zelda and Cody and his best friend Bobcat Goldthwait would have helped fill in the blanks. Sadly, none of them, as well as Garces, decided to participate, though at least Bobcat’s perspective is seen in archive interview footage.

Still, Velardi’s and Zak Williams’ presence helps get us a little closer to Williams, and Zenovich doesn’t shy away from many of the issues that dogged him his entire life, like drug use, perpetual loneliness, and the inability to turn his performing self off unless he was completely exhausted.

Our Call: Stream It. You won’t get a better look at someone who was a pretty closed book, despite being A-list famous. And remembering moments like his best movie roles, his stand-up specials and more will make you smile instead of cry.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind on HBO