A small cottage industry has built up out of documentaries about movie stars with major health problems. Well, maybe just two movies. Two years ago there was Val, the retrospective on Val Kilmer’s career conducted in the wake of his debilitation by throat cancer. Now we get Still – or the full title Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie that AppleTV+ has slapped on it, even though it never appears in the movie – which is about, you guessed it, Michael J. Fox. Perhaps at least in Kilmer’s case, there was a desire to show fans what happened to him, why we no longer see him on screen, for those who didn’t know.

It wouldn’t be possible not to know what happened to Michael J. Fox. Any number of us learned about Parkinson’s Disease for the first time when Fox announced he had the affliction 25 years ago, seven years after he was diagnosed, when the effort to hide it from everybody was becoming too great. “Still,” then, refers to his usually futile attempts to control his tremors, which can be managed some with drugs but always come back with a vengeance. It also reminds us that at age 61, mostly out of the spotlight except for his work to raise awareness about the disease and funding to fight it, Fox is “still” here.

Fox has selected an excellent filmmaker to tell his story. Davis Guggenheim is the director of several well-regarded documentaries over the years, from An Inconvenient Truth to He Named Me Malala, and he seems to be a fortuitous choice to dramatise Fox’s very inconvenient truth.

There are any number of ways to make a documentary without relying on the standard talking head format, and for starters, Fox is the only “head” who actually talks to Guggenheim. But what gives Still its decided sense of momentum is the decision to tell Fox’s story by shrewdly employing footage from his various TV shows and movies, itself functioning as a narrative device. As just one example, when discussing a truly full-on period of the star’s professional history, when he was making Back to the Future at night while filming Family Ties during the day, Guggenheim shows us the minuscule amount of sleep he was receiving through that shot of Marty McFly sawing logs while lying on his face with his arms awkwardly behind his back, semi-entangled in suspenders.

The choice really works, and reminds us how much Fox did pack into a career of less than 20 years. There was the period when the pint-sized Canadian was appearing in anonymous projects we’ve never heard of, always playing five years younger than his actual age – one sort of hilarious turn as a doctor prompts the question of whether this show was some sort of proto Doogie Howser M.D. At this age he describes scrounging for small change to pay for his lunch.

When Fox took off, he really took off, with the twin sensations of the aforementioned Family Ties and Back to the Future. The various twists and turns his career took, including the predictable period of over-indulgence, are perfectly suited to footage from Bright Lights, Big City, and yes, you’ll be glad to know that Teen Wolf makes its appearance too.

Of course, the truly illuminating portion of the film, for anyone already versed in his greatest hits, is what everyday life is like for Fox in 2023. One heart-warming revelation, which is held back until the movie is maybe 30 minutes old, is that his wife, fellow actor Tracy Pollan – whom he met on the set of Family Ties – is still with him all these years later. “In sickness and in health,” she whispered to him after he told her about his diagnosis, and if your heart doesn’t melt at that moment, you might just be a monster.

In fact, having Parkinson’s has not prevented Fox from having a rich family life, as his grown children – a son and twin daughters – are a sunny presence in this film, giving him a hard time and making light jokes about his condition, a tacit acknowledgement that Fox welcomes such jokes and in fact would hate to be handled with kid gloves. The spitfire personality we met some 40 years ago would never have allowed that.

Then there are the alarming aspects of Parkinson’s beyond the involuntary movements of appendages, aspects the audience may not have previously considered. Fox’s motor skill deficiencies means he is often falling and banging into things, and if his face looks a little slouchy on one side during these interviews, it isn’t because he’s had a stroke. It’s because he’s broken all the bones in his cheek after a run-in with an inanimate object. This is the day-to-day existence for someone in Fox’s shoes.

A desire to still perform shines through, and it’s nice to note that Fox can, actually, provide clear readings of written narration for various portions of this life story. One wonders if we missed out on a career of Fox doing voiceover or animation work – much like the path chosen by another 80s icon, Mark Hammill, when his visage was no longer in demand in front of the camera for other reasons entirely. Fortunately, Still encourages us that even without fulfilling all his professional goals, Fox has led a life fully enriched in other ways.

 

Still is currently playing on AppleTV+.