The Must-Watch Michael J. Fox Documentary

Every time I think about cancelling my subscription to Apple Plus something comes along that blows my socks off; usually it’s a documentary. There are some great movies and TV shows on the channel but it’s the documentary features and series’ that have had the most impact for me.

A while back I told you about the Magic Johnson doco which is a great rival to everyone’s favourite Lockdown viewing, The Last Dance. More recently there’s been a wonderful, revealing and very human portrait of Selena Gomez which I haven’t written about as yet, but it was super compelling.

This weekend the film that hit me hard right in the feels – and I knew it was going to, but it went deeper than I expected – was the one about Michael J. Fox.

STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie is an inventive, entertaining, tender, funny and beautiful film. It reminds you that Michael J. Fox was the biggest star on the planet. And at pretty much the height of his fame he was given a Parkinson’s diagnosis.

He didn’t go public with his battle until he had lived with the disease for the better part of a decade. He was still making movies (The Frighteners), and he’d returned to TV (Spin City). In recent years he’s been back on the small screen drawing attention to the life sentence of his condition via characters (The Good Wife) or by playing a hyper-extension of himself (Curb Your Enthusiasm). He hasn’t lost his smile, nor that winning way he has of being funny without being a comedian.

Michael J. Fox has a winning way of reading a line. So much so that in his breakout role as Alex P. Keaton the Young Republican son of hippie parents Stephen and Elyse in Family Ties, he ultimately changed the flow and direction of the show. It was to be about those hippie parents navigating a buttoned-down family life. And in some ways it was. But Fox, not a dead cert casting choice, altered the focus. His character became the star.

Earlier last year I wrote about my love of Family Ties, it was one of the TV shows that shaped me; it was appointment viewing. It tied me to my own family in terms of how we would watch TV together.

And I was probably the right age for the rise of Michael J. Fox. A couple of seasons of Alex P. Keaton and next thing he’s in Back To The Future and Teen Wolf. I loved those movies the way I loved Beverly Hills Cop and Superstars of Wrestling and U2’s The Joshua Tree and the novels of Stephen King and Richard Bachman and collecting Batman and Garbage Pail Kids bubblegum cards. Transformers and Hubba Bubba and Masters of the Universe, That’s Incredible! Willard Price novels. And Family Ties, Teen Wolf, Back To The Future, The Secret of My Success, and that run of whatever came next: Bright Lights, Big City, even Doc Hollywood (though it wasn’t very good). I was just so on board. But Teen Wolf and Back To The Future were the ones. Always.

In today’s world of Instagram posts for attention, of paid promos and planned candid courtside shots of celebs attending NBA games, it’s important to think back to 1985 when Michael J. Fox had the number one (Future) and two (Wolf) movies. And was starring in Family Ties. That’s nuts! He was the Chandler Bing of the 80s. But bigger. Better.

Things started pretty small for Michael J. Fox. And in some ways they stayed that way. He was always tiny in stature. He was always dreaming big. He started playing 10 and 12 year old characters when he was 16. He was a great child actor because he had the brain to remember the cues and the timing. But he looked the part.

When he moves across the border and down to LA to try to be a star he’s in his late teens and he has a tiny, cramped apartment right on the corner of Struggle Street and Hollywood Dreams. He starts selling the furniture bit by bit to survive, lives on the packets of food he can find between the on-set catering. He’s nearly done when he lands the role of the lifetime.

It's a dizzying ride.

And Davis Guggenheim captures it all cleverly by using Fox’s narration and a mix of first-person, present-day interviews with clever recreations and footage from across Fox’s career. Guggenheim has made some inventive documentaries across the last two decades (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud, He Named Me Malala – just the other week I caught up with his 2011 U2 documentary, From The Sky Down, very good; didn’t even know it was him…)

Fox has been candid about his Parkinson’s since 1998. That’s when the world knew. Only his family knew before that. His wife, who he met on the set of Family Ties (Tracy Pollan) has stayed by him, it’s one of the best, most enduring and real of Hollywood love stories. They have four children together and in the film you meet the family. You see the family coping together, but more than just coping, this is a family living their lives, sharing a life together.

Fox is still funny, still has the light in his eyes, that spark. Still has the boyish charms and the voice that never quite grew up. He is Stuart Little after all. And still.

It's compelling for several reasons, and for everything that I’ve shared about it – none of this spoils the emotional impacts of the movie, nor the nostalgia buzz of going down the pathways to these movies and TV shows.

It is such a beautiful film. And there’s an understatement to it all. Even with Fox’s frank and candid comments. The reviews you will read elsewhere will lead with him saying that his world is getting smaller, that time is running down and that since he’s already lived longer than his doctor thought, if he’s still here in another 20 years he’ll either be “cured, or a pickle”.

But I didn’t want to start with those.

I thought I’d end with those instead.