“I was bigger than bubblegum,” says Michael J. Fox, reflecting on the heady heights of his 80s success, midway through the new documentary STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie.
“You think it’s made out of brick and rock but it’s not, it’s made out of paper and feathers. It’s an illusion.”
To say that the beloved Back to the Future and Family Ties star talks candidly about his life and career is an understatement.
Speaking directly to camera in his New York home, the 61-year-old actor reflects with unflinching, often hilarious honesty on a career that took him from starving Canadian bit player to what he calls “the boy prince of Hollywood” – as synonymous with the 80s as the Rubik’s cube and MTV – to tireless advocate for research into Parkinson’s disease, the degenerative condition he’s lived with for more than half his life.
“I should have seen it coming – the cosmic price I had to pay for all my success,” Fox remarks of his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 1991, when he was just 29.
“In the face of all evidence to the contrary, I was an acid bath of fear and professional insecurity,” he says, noting that his first sign of Parkinson’s-related trembling was “a message from the future”.
This portrait of the star, by Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), combines clips from Fox’s performances with media footage and expertly staged re-enactments, using each to supplement the actor’s wry commentary and narration, much of it taken from his bestselling 2002 memoir, Lucky Man.
As a celebrity documentary, STILL is cleverly crafted, scrambling time in ways that do the temporal rollercoaster Back to the Future Part II proud. At one point it seamlessly cuts from Fox’s disorientated Marty McFly, waking up in that movie’s alternate timeline, to the actor struggling to haul himself out of bed in the present day – a future stranger than any on-screen vision of his life could have imagined.
The montage suggests both a startling dissonance – the once livewire physical performer wrestling with the simplest of daily activities – and a remarkable continuity, with the star’s winning, indefatigable on-screen spirit remaining constant.
The film’s kinetic centrepiece, terrifically cut by editor Michael Harte, remixes film clips, behind-the-scenes footage and staged scenes to evoke the manic rush of a young star about to go supernova, as a delirious Fox races between the daytime set of Family Ties and night shoots for Back to the Future, running on three hours of daily sleep and a dream.
Fox’s subsequent, dizzying pop culture ubiquity is deftly evoked in a wealth of contemporaneous media footage, magazine covers and film and TV clips. Guggenheim remixes historical footage with excerpts from many of Fox’s films to underscore the narrative, drawing in particular from the star’s late-80s vehicles satirising yuppie aspiration (1987’s The Secret of My Success) and drug-addled career burnout (1988’s Bright Lights, Big City).
“Here is as hot as you get in the history of this business,” announces talk show host Phil Donahue in one archival grab, prefacing Fox’s appearance on his program.
Even at the pinnacle of his admitted hard-partying fame, Fox’s self-deprecating sense of humour – maybe it’s a Canadian thing – is evident. Collecting the first of his five primetime Emmys in 1986, the pocket-sized star quipped: “I feel four feet tall.”
Fox’s signature wit, and his constant quest for the punchline, had long been his ace, from his days as a drama kid evading high school bullies to stealing the sitcom that was originally designed to showcase his character’s middle-aged hippy parents.
But it also belies his gift for extracting the emotional truth in a scene, especially one played for fast comedy, or opposite elaborate special effects – a highwire act that he always made look easy.
Consider the scene in John Badham’s underrated 1991 action comedy The Hard Way, in which Fox’s preening Hollywood playboy, pretending to be the girlfriend of James Woods’s hard-boiled New York detective, amusingly deploys his thespian talent to puncture the cop’s emotionally stunted masculinity. Or the bravura season five episode of Family Ties where the actor’s young Republican Alex P. Keaton has an existential face off with God – and never misses a comic beat.
By his own admission, Fox’s comedic chops also went hand in hand with a kind of emotional evasiveness, especially when his superstardom was shattered by the revelation of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. For much of the 90s, in film and on his hit TV series Spin City, he used actorly tricks to disguise his condition.
“You’re only as sick as your secrets,” he admits, one of the many self-help aphorisms that he delivers with conviction.
The documentary’s back half will feel familiar to those who’ve followed Fox’s advocacy and activism in the field of Parkinson’s research across the last two decades, as he pivots to owning his public narrative and living his life with grace and acceptance.
It’s never self-pitying or maudlin, and is laced with Fox’s determination to get the laugh – no matter how grim the circumstance. During the course of Guggenheim’s shooting, the actor breaks his hand, requiring the insertion of multiple pins, and shatters his face after tumbling into a piece of furniture – a fall that hurt, Fox jokes, even from his diminutive height.
A visit to the physiotherapist gives us a glimpse into the actor’s desire to perform physical comedy despite his obvious limitations; you can see him working overtime for the punchlines, even when his face – limited by Parkinson’s degenerative effects on expression – can’t move as fast as his mind.
Even so, you sometimes have to wonder to what extent Fox’s instincts as a performer are underwriting his presentation; whether the effects of Parkinson’s are taking a greater toll on this eternal optimist than even the film’s confessional format permits him to express.
In a revealing moment, he admits to the pressure of performing his public profile, both as a generational icon and head of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, an aside that casts a shadow over his upbeat image.
“I’ve interviewed you for hours and hours and hours, and you’ve never told me once, ‘I’m in pain’,” Guggenheim says at one point.
“I’m in pain. I’m in intense pain,” Fox responds, grinning; to which he adds: “I’m not gonna lead with it.”
It’s a testament to a performer who refuses to meet life’s curveballs with anything less than grace and good humour. And STILL is a fitting tribute, told with cinematic craft and care.
STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie is on Apple TV+.