"Sr."

Robert Downey Sr. is eighty, living with Parkinson's in his Manhattan apartment, and insists on joining the shoot of the documentary about him with his own camera. His son Robert Downey Jr. is both interviewer and producer. There is unfinished business between them: the father gave his son drugs as a child, and the film does not end before it gets there. The documentary starts as a life story and turns into something about ageing and dying. Downey Sr. cuts his own footage, overrules the director, proposes scenes, and that stubbornness ends up shaping the form of the film. Chris Smith directed. It is in black and white. Its subject was one of the outer edges of American independent cinema in the sixties and seventies, remembered above all for his 1969 satire Putney Swope. It showed at Telluride in September 2022, opened in cinemas on 18 November and went to Netflix on 2 December. Downey Sr. died while filming was still going on, and the last section does not hide it. Who it is for: anyone who likes film-history documentaries and father-and-son portraits. Who it is not for: anyone looking for distance. This was made from inside the family, the producers are the family, and some hard questions are asked with the edges taken off.