Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Adrienne’ on HBO Max, a Loving Documentary Portrait of Adrienne Shelly, by Her Grieving Husband

HBO Max’s Adrienne is another celeb biodoc for 2021, and it might be the saddest one yet. It profiles Adrienne Shelly, the indie-movie actress and one-time ’90s It Girl — note: you can’t NOT be called an It Girl if you once tongue-kissed Evan Dando on the cover of SPIN magazine — who was murdered in 2006, a few months before her film passion project Waitress debuted. The movie, which she wrote, directed and co-starred in, became a Sundance hit, a critical and art-theater success and, eventually, a popular Broadway musical. And it’s in the wake of her posthumous crossover breakthrough that her husband, Andy Ostroy, directed Adrienne, a heartbreaking and bittersweet remembrance of not just who she was, but also who she was becoming.

ADRIENNE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: On Oct. 31, 2006, Adrienne Shelly was joyful. We see home video footage of her at a Halloween party, her two-year-old daughter Sophie wearing a silver princess gown. “I went to bed that night the luckiest guy alive,” narrates Andy Ostroy, Adrienne’s husband and Sophie’s father. The next day, Ostroy dropped off Adrienne at her apartment-office in Greenwich Village, and never saw her alive again. She had been incommunicado all day, and when Ostroy stopped by to check on her, he found Adrienne dead, hanging from a bedsheet thrown over a shower curtain rod. Police initially declared the death a suicide, but that didn’t make a bit of sense to Ostroy, her mother, her friends, anyone who worked with her. Of course, they were right. Not much time passed before cops nabbed 19-year-old Diego Pillco, who had been working in the apartment building. He confessed to strangling her, and staging the body to look like suicide.

Now it’s 2019, and evidence of Adrienne’s life dominates a block on Broadway, where Waitress has been running for more than three years and 1,500-plus shows. Sadly, people on the street who attend the production don’t even know her name. She wrote the original screenplay when she was eight months pregnant with Sophie, as “a love letter to my baby,” she says in an archival clip. The movie starred Keri Russell as a diner waitress who channeled her oft-repressed emotions into succulent pie recipes; pregnant and married to a lout, she falls in love with her obstetrician. Only Adrienne could sell such a potentially problematic premise, her friends and the film’s stars attest. She also directed herself in the film, in a supporting role as a shy, eccentric waitress.

Waitress, the movie, would’ve been a new beginning for Adrienne’s career — she was a fresh new voice telling feminist stories whose previous writer-directorial efforts (among them Sudden Manhattan and I’ll Take You There) never gained much commercial traction. She was born Adrienne Levine, a theater kid in high school who dropped out of college to become an actress in New York. The gambit worked — she became an overnight success after Hal Hartley cast her as the lead in The Unbelievable Truth, and then again in 1990’s Trust. In Ostroy’s words, she “did a lot of crappy movies in the ’90s” as she tried to orient her career; she gradually steered toward production, directing her own work and starting a theater company.

Notably, Adrienne took her father’s name, Shelly, as her professional surname, in tribute. He died of a heart attack when she was 12, which had a profound effect on her. Now, Ostroy talks openly with her mother, Elaine, about what they have in common: the unending grief they experience in the wake of their spouse’s death. Ostroy speaks to all his interviewees in this warm, frank manner. He doesn’t limit the talking heads in Adrienne to just sympathetic faces — at the 40-minute mark, he says, “I want to meet him,” and that “him” is Pillco, Adrienne’s killer.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Just this year, Punky Brewster star Soleil Moon Frye looked back on her turbulent child-star life in Kid 90, and Val Kilmer dived deep into his navel with the startlingly intimate and moving Val.

Performance Worth Watching: Let me save you some time here: Trust is available as a rental on Amazon Prime; Waitress is on Amazon, Vudu and many of the regular rental services; and someone needs to nab the streaming rights for The Unbelievable Truth in the wake of this documentary.

Memorable Dialogue: Adrienne talks about her father’s passing: “My life will always be about grief.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Adrienne is a lovely tribute to Adrienne Shelly, which Ostroy quietly turns into an understated, deeply personal essay about grief. As a filmmaker, he shifts deftly between Adrienne’s life, work and death, staging interviews as conversations, frequently posing quasi-therapeutic, how-do-you-feel-about-that questions. He’s often on screen, most frequently with the now-teenage Sophie, who barely remembers her mother, yet still seems haunted by it; she admits that she often hides her emotions, even though she knows it isn’t healthy. Ostroy documented the conversations he had with his daughter over the years, the probing curiosity of a child trying to understand death, and stages the conversations as animated line drawings with voiceover actors.

The film’s most dramatic arc builds to the meeting with Pillco, and even though it’s an act of courage for Ostroy, it isn’t the most significant moment. Ostroy dreads the meeting — he and Pillco mutually agreed on it — but feels a compelling urge to tell the guy about the person he killed, about everything she won’t experience. And those things aren’t her inevitable films and other creative endeavors, but moments with Sophie. Motherhood was her life’s work, her joy, and that was taken from her. But Adrienne is a celebration as much as it is a lament. One can sense Ostroy working through his grief by sharing his wife’s joie de vivre with the rest of the world, essentially an extension of what Waitress was all about: Motherhood, art, perseverance and love.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Adrienne is an acute, heartfelt portrait of a tragedy, coming from a pure and loving place.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Adrienne on HBO Max