‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ Review: Hiding in Plain Sight

With apologies to Dr. Emmett Brown, you don’t want a flux capacitor to construct a time machine. All you want to do is make a movie. “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” a brand new biographical documentary from Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), zips by way of the “Back to the Future” actor’s profession with humor and magnificence; it gives the look that its topic is prepared to reply any query. Fox seems, head-on, in modern interviews with an off-camera Guggenheim. None of the charisma and allure that made him a star have diminished.

But a lot of what distinguishes “Still” — because it’s merely titled onscreen, sans advertising hook — is how cleverly it has been edited. While this documentary attracts on a typical device equipment of re-enactments and archival materials, its greatest system is to make use of clips of Fox’s personal films as a counterpoint to his phrases, as if Fox weren’t taking part in fictional characters, however himself.

In a manner, he was. “Still” charts his experiences studying to reside with Parkinson’s illness, a analysis he saved personal for years earlier than going public in 1998. One montage — tackily however irresistibly set to INXS’s “New Sensation” — illustrates how he managed to cover his sickness in plain sight. Movies like “For Love or Money” (1993) and “Life With Mikey” (1993) reveal his observe of placing an object in his left hand to masks its trembling. What seemed like nimble character work was, even then, documentary proof.

Guggenheim presents this sequence as if it have been depicting a bootleg drug binge, partially as a result of Fox discusses his behavior of popping Sinemet tablets to maintain up his degree of dopamine, which is poor in Parkinson’s sufferers. The section ends by slicing to the present-day Fox, who says he wants extra tablets and asks Guggenheim for a few minutes in order that the meds can kick in, to make him much less “mumble-mouthed.”

“Still” actually doesn’t sugarcoat Fox’s life with Parkinson’s. An early scene reveals him taking a spill throughout the road from Central Park. At one other level, a make-up artist offers him a touch-up as a result of a fall has damaged bones in his face. But such moments are reminders of simply how a lot any film would essentially depart unseen.

The movie establishes a brisk, interesting tempo early on, as Fox, the one formal speaking head (though we see him together with his household), recollects how he got here to performing. The title comes from one in every of Guggenheim’s queries: “Before Parkinson’s, what would it mean to be still?” Fox solutions, “I wouldn’t know.”

After transferring from his native Canada to Hollywood, he says, he lived in an residence so cramped that he washed his hair with Palmolive and his dishes with Head & Shoulders. Marty McFly emerges as an virtually autobiographical creation, as a result of the making of “Back to the Future” (1985) required Fox to have interaction in a little bit of temporal dislocation himself. To fulfill his obligations to the sitcom “Family Ties” whereas making the film, he needed to shuttle between units, with little sleep in between. In one other toe-tapping montage — this time scored to Alan Silvestri’s “Back to the Future” theme — “Still” conveys the sheer whirlwind of what Fox’s life was like as drivers chauffeured him from one place to a different and he might barely hold straight which position he was taking part in.

Fox’s spouse, Tracy Pollan, who appeared with him as a love curiosity in “Family Ties” and as a potential salvation for the cocaine-addled journal worker he performed in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), is held up as a uncommon one who might stand as much as his vanity throughout his peak interval of stardom. “Still” turns into one thing of a love story, of how Pollan stayed with Fox not simply by way of his illness however throughout lengthy gig-related absences and what he characterizes as a interval of alcoholism.

But the documentary is, maybe improbably, not a downer within the least. It isn’t oriented primarily round sickness, even because it reveals Fox working with docs and aides all through. It’s a personality examine wherein Fox displays on his life with fast wit and self-deprecation. “If I’m here 20 years from now, I’ll either be cured or like a pickle,” he says. The real-life Marty McFly could not have a time machine. But he now has this crowd-pleaser of a film.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+.