Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ on Apple TV+, an Unusually Inspiring and Vulnerable Celeb Biodoc

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (now on Apple TV+) is the latest in a growing trend of wow-I-can’t-believe-they-let-us-see-that celebrity biographical documentaries, docs that sometimes feel a lot like therapy sessions. And here, we get to watch Fox’s actual therapy sessions, physical ones, ones that train him how to walk and twist his torso and perform other motor skills hampered by Parkinson’s disease. Director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman) profiles the retired movie and TV star, and we learn that he spent years hiding his medical challenges. But now, Fox seems to be making up for that by sharing everything about them, and many other things about himself.  

STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An uncanny reenactment: Fox was in Florida. 1990. He woke up hung over, which apparently wasn’t too terribly uncommon for him for a while. He looked at his left hand, and his pinky was twitching. He tried to recall the previous night. Was it another of his “legendary drunken fights” with his drinking buddy Woody Harrelson? We know it wasn’t, of course. It was the first day of a life that would become, in Fox’s own words, “an acid bath of fear and professional insecurity.” He was a 1980s megastar. He broke through with smash TV sitcom Family Ties, where he was so good, so funny, producers tweaked the series M.O. to make his Alex P. Keaton the central character. He conquered the big screen with Back to the Future, a hit so huge, it made other hits look puny. 

So is this going to be the story of Fox getting a disease and he tumbles from a very high vantage point? “Yeah,” he says in one of many direct-address interviews for this doc, “that’s boring.” Notably, he’s pretty much the only talking-head interviewee here. We meet his wife, Tracy Pollan, Alex P. Keaton’s on-screen girlfriend who became Michael J. Fox’s off-screen partner, and their four kids. We also meet his physical therapist, who we see coaching Fox, teaching him to slow down and be deliberate with his movements so he doesn’t lose control. There’s a scar under his eye from when he fell and hit a piece of furniture and had to have screws put in to hold his face together; there’s a bandage on his hand from when he fell and broke bones and had to have screws put in to hold his hand together and it got infected and there was talk of amputating a finger. How does Fox describe himself? As a “tough S.O.B.”, he says. 

How else does he describe himself? Short: “Gravity is real, even when you fall from my height,” he cracks. He was always small and quick, advantages he’d use to run from bullies when he was a kid in Edmonton. He was always in trouble, got bad grades, crashed cars, drank, smoked. He found himself in drama club, where he was small enough and his voice was squeaky enough to play characters many years his younger. His tough, pragmatic father dialed back on the toughness and pragmatism when he used his charge card to fund Fox’s sojourn to Los Angeles after he dropped out of school. He lived in a teensy apartment and got this bit part and that bit part; cue the footage of that old McDonald’s commercial, and in fact, cue the footage of all kinds of clips from Fox’s TV and film roles, because Guggenheim likes to cut in scenes from them that mirror whatever piece of Fox’s life he’s telling us about. 

Fox was on the cusp of giving up on the Hollywood dream when he ad-libbed the “P” in Alex P. Keaton and got huge, huge laughs. Huge. That was 1982. A producer didn’t want to cast him because he asserted that Fox would never end up on a lunchbox. Guess what? Fox ended up on a lunchbox. Some of you no doubt had one. There’s a funny sequence in which Fox explains how he worked on Family Ties during the day and was schlepped to and from night shoots on Back to the Future, and it lasted for many nigh-sleepless weeks. By the following year, 1985, 30 percent of American households were watching his show every week, and he was the star of the year’s top-grossing film. “I was bigger than bubblegum,” he says. But his eventual Parkinson’s diagnosis was “the cosmic price I had to pay for all my success,” he muses. He hid it for a long time, masking his symptoms with prescription medication, medicating himself with alcohol, mothballing his film career, and sticking to TV, where he anchored Spin City for a while without the public knowing about his struggles. But he had to come out eventually.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Need more intimate celeb biodocs? Just in recent memory: Robert Downey Jr. and his father in Sr., Jonah Hill and his psychotherapist in Stutz, the Gainsbourgs in Jane by Charlotte, Soleil Moon Frye in Kid 90, David Arquette’s lifelong love of pro wrestling in You Cannot Kill David Arquette, and witness a close parallel to Fox’s medical struggles in Val, about Val Kilmer’s lift after throat cancer ravaged his voice.

Performance Worth Watching: Couldn’t take our eyes off Fox in ’85; still can’t.  

Memorable Dialogue: Fox is still effortlessly funny. I’ve quoted him a few times already. Here’s another one: “If I’m here 20 years from now, I’ll either be cured or, or, or… a pickle.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Few things in life are more powerful than nostalgia, and few things from the 1980s are more nostalgia-inducing than Back to the Future. But Fox – he’s bigger than both. That’s saying something. You almost forget how ubiquitous he was. Almost. Bright Lights, Big City. The Secret of My Success. We see clips from those here. They’re chosen carefully: He always seems to be running from one place to another. He was an underrated, understated physical comedian, using a kind of nervous energy to enhance performances – nervous energy that manifested as tics and twitches he used to hide the effects of his condition. He was never the title of this documentary, and because of the nature of Parkinson’s, he never will be until… well, until he’s a pickle. 

But let’s not think about that. We needn’t be morbid. Fox is here, right now, on our TVs, frequently looking directly at us, being funny. He doesn’t have to try. He just is. He’s also quite frank, self-deprecating, but never self-pitying. Balancing his natural charisma with the vulnerability that, as the film explores, it took him years to come to terms with. Now, Guggenheim asks him if he’s in pain, and he flatly answers, all the time. The empathetic folk among us might read the previous sentence and feel a tear well up, but in the context of this documentary, you won’t. Fox is too matter-of-fact about the hand he’s been dealt. All he can do is play it.

I’ve been wrestling with whether biodocs are better with or without their subjects’ endorsement or involvement. If they don’t, they seem bereft of the subject’s personality. If they do, they tend towards hagiography or being vanity projects. Still feels different, because Fox is singular. He’s 1/1. Nobody’s like him – the signature cracking voice, the blistering comic timing, the rascally charm. They’re all still accounted for. There’s a hint of tragedy in the subtext – would he have won an Oscar or spearheaded a prestige TV project? Would he still be making us laugh, had cruel fate not intervened? But Fox doesn’t seem to be concerned about the what-ifs. No, Still is all about what is, and that’s why it’s a standout portrait of courage and inspiration, whether he wants it to be or not.

Our Call: Still is the best of the new celeb-biodoc trend. It gives us some of what we want – nostalgia, an inside look at a famous person’s life. But it gives us a lot of what we need – honesty and truth. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.