Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stutz’ on Netflix, Jonah Hill’s Pensive Documentary Tribute to His Psychotherapist

Jonah Hill directs and sort of stars in Stutz (now on Netflix), a documentary about his therapist, Phil Stutz. Besides a supporting role in 2021’s Don’t Look Up, Hill’s career in front of the camera has been relatively quiet compared to his post-Superbad breakout, which yielded the hit 21 Jump Street movies, two best supporting actor Oscar nods for The Wolf of Wall Street and Moneyball, and his 2018 directorial debut, mid90s. As you may expect from a doc about a Hollywood star and his shrink, Stutz is a deeply personal project for Hill; he hopes that others will benefit from Stutz’s talk-therapy techniques and philosophies as they helped him.

STUTZ: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A little context: Jonah Hill has been going to therapy with Stutz – ostensibly “Dr. Stutz,” although it might be noteworthy that we never hear that phrase – for many years. Hill talks a little about his anxiety attacks and a little more about the body image issues he’s had since his teenage years, but this movie, he insists, is not about that. It’s about Stutz and who he is and what he does to help people improve their mental health, and Hill’s purpose is to expose as many people as possible to Stutz’s ideas. They sit down across from each other and talk, presumably like they do regularly so, as Stutz jokes, Hill can “dump all his shit” on him.

A little about what Stutz does: He tries not to distance himself from his patients with the usual tell-me-how-you-feel-about-that psychotherapist stuff. It needs to be more personal, he insists. He scrawls crude drawings on notecards to turn “big ideas into simple images,” representing components of his therapeutic techniques: “Life force,” or your relationship with your body, other people and yourself. “Part X” is the part of you that’s judgmental, the villain inside you that, in Stutz’s own words, is trying to “f— up your shit.” “The Maze” is where you get hung up on trauma from your past – and he goes on to more actualized ideas such as “active love” and “radical acceptance.” He’s big on visualization, you know, closing your eyes and bringing these ideas to life with your own imagery.

And now, a little about Stutz: Cut into the psychotherapeutic conceptual fodder are key biographical bits. Perhaps we noticed that Stutz’s drawings and handwriting, presented with simple animation, look crude and shaky – that’s due to Parkinson’s disease, which he’s had “for a very long time.” Stutz talks about his younger brother, who died at age three, and we eventually learn that the death of Hill’s brother forms a bridge of empathy between the two men. Stutz talks about his mother, who grew up with an abusive father and was therefore trapped in “the maze” for a long time. Stutz alludes to an unusual romantic relationship that he’s had with a woman “off and on for 40 years.” Sometimes the topic turns to Hill and his personal issues, which he diverts back to Stutz, although frankly, no movie about Hill’s shrink can avoid those topics, can they? I mean, Jonah’s mom Sharon Feldstein even turns up for a few minutes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This type of deeply personal doc directed by someone we know primarily as an actor feels similar to Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Jane by Charlotte.

Performance Worth Watching: Stutz is less about one of these guys and all about the rapport between them. It’s warm and thoughtful and revealing and funny, although it’s fair to say Hill’s comic chemistry with Channing Tatum was funnier.

Memorable Dialogue: Stutz’s mostly (or at least half-) joking opening line for every session with Hill: “Entertain me.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Hugs all around! Stutz is a sweet, tender and lightly revelatory film, part self-help guide, part biography, with each part informing the other. Crucially, Hill doesn’t let the documentary become a public therapy session for himself, although he lets the chips fall where they may when it comes to addressing some of his personal issues – sharing, but not oversharing, is key to our understanding of how Stutz’s therapy works. Ultimately, and almost certainly inevitably, the movie becomes about Hill; he is, after all, the director, to whom this work is of the greatest importance.

And it’s with a great, absolutely and logically appropriate ouroborosian flourish that Hill openly questions his motive for making the film in the first place: “Was it a f—ing terrible idea for a patient to make a movie about his therapist?” he asks Stutz, before revealing the artifice that making movies inevitably requires, quite literally breaking down walls. For what is a movie about self analysis that doesn’t analyze itself? Vulnerability is one of the primary threads of mental health and therapy, so why wouldn’t Hill find a way for the art of filmmaking to reflect that both literally and symbolically?

We’ve seen Hill do terrific things in front of a camera before, mostly terrifically funny things. He and Stutz talk about how they both “avoid emotion by making jokes.” They seem like a perfect fit, Stutz being a no-nonsense New Yorker with a deadpan sense of humor and propensity for casual profanity; he breaks the stereotype by revealing that people have poured their hearts out to him since he was a “little kid,” thus putting his destiny into motion. He’s a compelling character, and you’d be hard-pressed not to feel sympathetic to his struggles with death and ill health. As for the practical application of his techniques to your own life, well, has he written a book, or should we be taking detailed notes? Even if you walk away without some useful self-improvement tips – and you very well might! – Stutz is a heartwarming story about a shrink helping Hill with therapy and a filmmaker helping Stutz with a movie.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Stutz is a charmingly atypical, cleverly constructed documentary that addresses the need for mental health maintenance through the open-hearted rapport between two vulnerable men. You’ll chuckle a few times, and might just walk away with a few nuggets of wisdom, too.

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