“It all looks sweetly narcissistic,” says veteran underground and indie film-maker Robert Downey Sr at one stage in this documentary about him, produced by and prominently featuring his movie star son Robert Downey Jr. That’s a fair comment on the whole proceedings, but there is definitely something sweet, sad and affectionate about this home-movie portrait, which Downey Jr began as an open-ended project in 2019 as his dad was beginning to submit to Parkinson’s in his 80s.
The idea – which maybe always existed more in theory than practice – was that they would be co-creating it, with Downey Sr working on his own alternative edit. But the movie ends with a piercingly emotional deathbed scene in Downey Sr’s apartment in New York, with his son and grandson in attendance.
The elder Downey was a radical director who rode the 60s countercultural wave in New York, getting noticed for his wacky, irreverent and sexy 16mm films and then for his barnstorming anti-racist satire Putney Swope in 1969, starring Arnold Johnson, about a black takeover of a Madison Avenue ad agency. Like almost every documentary about a prominent American these days, Sr features the mandatory clip of the subject on The Dick Cavett Show. An attempt to make a studio film ended in tears, as he declined to dial down his trademark anarchy, but Downey Sr continued to work, completing his final film in 2005, a documentary about a year in the life of Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia.
Downey Sr had a cast of players who were like family to him, including his first wife, Downey Jr’s late mother Elsie Ford, and he put the infant Robert in his movies. Father and son would both develop a taste for drugs, Downey Sr having already introduced Jr to the arguably far more dangerous and addictive drug of movie celebrity.
Downey Sr is a potent personality, delivering hilarious one-liners about his life and work with a rasping New York voice – very different from his son’s more questioning, ironic tone, which perhaps owes more to Los Angeles, a city Downey Sr does not care for. I would in some ways have liked to see more of him on screen, or just interviewed by someone who wasn’t as close to him, but this is a tender tribute.
• Sr is released on 2 December on Netflix.
