STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces review – intimate portrait of a comedy legend

From his childhood job in Disneyland and huge standup success to movie stardom and later life career as a dry humorist this is a fascinating insight into a wild and crazy career

Comedian Steve Martin now comes as close as he’s ever going to get to opening up about his life, his thoughts and his feelings in this absorbingly detailed two-part Apple documentary by director Morgan Neville. Part one is conventionally autobiographical, with archive clips and family photos and Martin’s own sonorous, ironic voiceover covering his painful childhood: failing to please his strict dad and then the extraordinary, 15-year battle to make it as a standup, finally becoming a colossal stadium-level success in his mid-30s powered by smash-hit TV appearances on David Letterman and Johnny Carson. America loved his wacky, formless but almost childishly innocent and in many ways old-fashioned routines – a world away from the tougher commentaries of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor.

Part two shifts from first-person to third-person; there’s no voiceover commentary, but a series of interviews with Martin in his home, solo, or with his wife Anne Stringfield or buddy and performing partner Martin Short – a documentary style closer to the celeb-on-celeb podcast or Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. This second half is about the more chequered, but nonetheless consistently lucrative and eventful career in movies into which he pivoted in 1979, leaving behind forever his wild-and-crazy-guy standup persona. And it was at this stage that audiences saw in big-screen closeup that unsmiling face, an opaque expression of alienation and loneliness under the iron-grey hair. (As Short says, he hasn’t aged because he looked 70 at 30.)