Still: A Michael J Fox Movie review – An intimate glimpse of an 80s icon whose Parkinsons battle made him a hero to millions

Selected cinemas/Apple TV+; Cert Club

Michael J Fox’s indomitable spirit shines through the film

Hilary White

It might be hard for your children to understand just how ginormous Michael J Fox was at the peak of his fame. His was a 1980s kind of stardom, a time when celebrities were more untouchable than they are today, when magazine covers and chat shows were the barometer in which wattage was measured.

And then there were the box office receipts. When the baby-faced Canadian star of sitcom Family Ties transitioned into feature films, the curve to fame steepened sharply. Between Teen Wolfand the Back to the Future trilogy alone, Fox was the decade’s eminent multi-million-dollar teen idol.

At the root of this wild popularity was his endearingly diminutive stature and fresh-faced looks. But Fox also had uncanny comic traits, both in his timing and a limber physicality that could mine laughs from a scamper across a film set or an exasperated groan.

STILL Official Trailer

Sadly, the only thing more remarkable about Fox’s level of fame was the cruelty of his Parkinson’s diagnosis at just 29 years of age. By that time – as crazy as it is to think – he was out the other side of a Hollywood career and had come full circle back to where he began life. Spin City, a sitcom that saw him play the deputy mayor of New York, was a hit and a lifeline for Fox after a period of some professional soul searching.

That the incurable degenerative motor disease should come just as a fruitful new chapter was beginning ranks as the kind of luck you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.​

As he reveals in this intimate and spirited documentary portrait from Davis Guggenheim, Fox kept it hidden through a combination of pill-popping (to bring up his dopamine levels) and sly handheld props to disguise the tremors. The stress of starring in the show while obscuring a life-changing illness made the symptoms worse, however, and Fox was forced to go public.

‘Enter editor (and Donegal man) Michael Harte, who happened to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the icon’s canon’

Doing so just seemed to heighten the public’s love for a star still cherished as fundamental to a generation’s nostalgia. Fox not only continued to work but became an effective and always self-deprecating campaigner for the disease that was gradually robbing him of motor control.

Guggenheim, a filmmaker whose documentary work has examined everything from global warming (An Inconvenient Truth) to guitar gods (It Might Get Loud), had wonderful raw materials to work with.

Using Fox’s 2020 memoir No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality as a rough template, his film behaves more like an immersive biographical experience than a straight-up documentary portrait, as if a life as extraordinary as this required a format that was equally so.

Enter editor (and Donegal man) Michael Harte, who happened to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the icon’s canon. Between interview extracts with the star (Fox is always companionable, courageous, and buoyant, throughout) or his day-to-day life, cuts from the star’s show reel reflect the events of his real life, sometimes with uncanny harmony.

Any gaps are then filled in by dramatised versions using actors. This scrapbook format proves to be delightful, switching the point of angle and placing frames around frames.

Perhaps most impressively of all, Guggenheim, much like Fox himself, resists the obvious opportunity to milk Fox’s health tragedy so that violin strings are forced upon the viewer. Scenes where he and his physiotherapist are at work in the gym, or Fox at home with family, say plenty about the daily implications of such a condition, as does the obvious bedrock of strength Fox draws from his remarkable wife Tracy Pollan.

Still is an inspiring depiction of living with a disability. Fox doesn’t so much shrug it all off as disarm the misfortune with a sense of humour that is clearly as quick and agile as ever. At one point, Guggenheim asks him mid-interview if he is in any pain at that very moment. “Intense pain,” Fox casually replies. What more really needs to be said?

Between these more intimate moments, the 1980s nostalgia, and the punctuating clips of Marty McFly or Mike Flaherty, Still is as salient as it is animated.

As for those too young to remember the era that Fox defined, this film will introduce them to an indomitable spirit who manages to locate humour in confronting the hand he’s been dealt.

Four stars