Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces
There’s nothing worse than watching a bio-doc about a revolutionary, unique, creative voice that reduces the life story of its subject to the basic beats, using standard techniques instead of embracing that which made this person’s story worth telling in the first place. Director Morgan Neville (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”) likely struggled with this potential trap when approaching the life of Steve Martin, a man who has defied easy categorization his entire life. From his breakthrough days on the comedy stage, when he somehow merged an old-fashioned sense of humor with a brave new way of making people laugh, to when he left that behind to become a writer, film star, novelist, playwright, and a current TV star, Martin has been tough to pin down. Neville attempts to capture Steve Martin’s ability to never be put in an easy box in Apple TV+’s “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces” by telling the two halves of his story in completely different formats. It’s a clever move to make what is essentially two feature-length documentaries about the man, and yet it still somehow feels like some of this story remains untold. That’s just how rich Steve Martin’s career has been.
The first half of “Steve!” is a pretty straightforward piece of archive-driven documentary filmmaking, using old photos and clips of Martin’s childhood and ascendance to superstardom under audio of Martin and people who knew him then. From his days working at Disneyland to his love of magic as a young man, Neville tracks the formation of Martin’s stage persona. There are some fascinating insights into Martin’s process, such as when he explains how a punchline is designed to release tension in an audience, but he sought to keep the tension going, playing with the very form of a comedy show. There’s also the sharp context of Martin’s rise that notes that he was a sort of response to the Vietnam Era in which everything, even comedy, felt like it had to be serious. With an arrow through his head, Martin was defiantly silly.
What I always loved about Martin from a very young age was his willingness to be both goofy and deceptively intellectual at the same time. He could nail a great old-fashioned laugher that would be called a “dad joke” today or jump around on his happy feet, but there was a deep intelligence behind everything Martin did. You could just tell. It was like his brain, heart, and funny bone were all playing together in unison. It was conceptual as much as it was goofy. And when Martin realized that the concept had run out of steam in 1980, he walked away at the top of his game.
The first half of “Steve!,” subtitled “Then,” hints at some of the darker chapters in its subject life, but this is not a standard tell-all. Martin’s father was remarkably cold and even cruel; Martin became obsessed with satisfying entire audiences, talking about being obsessed with the one empty seat in a sold-out show; a sort of pompous persona that he refined on-stage led to him being defined that way off of it—Neville has a habit of feigning to deeper waters like these before going back to the shallower ones, likely out of deference to a man who seems reluctant to open up too much about his life. Consequently, the first half of “Steve!” becomes more about a career than a person, which left me feeling a little distant from the subject at its conclusion.
