A wickedly industrious joke-machine intellect attached to a pneumatic pair of eyebrows, John Belushi was the king of American comedy in the mid-to-late 1970s. At the peak of his career, he could boast a sinecure at “Saturday Night Live,” blockbuster movies, a hit band, and the best Toshiro Mifune imitation ever to hit American TV. Nevertheless, as related in R.J. Cutler’s tragic documentary “Belushi,” he destroyed everything he had with the same abandon that John Landis wrecked police cruisers in their movie “The Blues Brothers.”
Using heretofore-unheard interviews from an oral history project by Tanner Colby, “Belushi” can be seen as something of a riposte to Bob Woodward’s 1984 biography “Wired.” The book is seen by people in Belushi’s circle as a cold, scathing, and exploitative take on their friend’s drug-related death in 1982 that ignores his talent and warmth. Cutler’s version is definitely sympathetic and somewhat of a family affair; resembling at times nothing so much as an Irish wake, with a whos-who of 1970s comedy legends (Penny Marshall, Ivan Reitman, Jane Curtin, Lorne Michaels, and more) passing around favorite memories and presenting different theories on what darkness drove him. Nevertheless, the movie does not stint on Belushi’s destructive, self-sabotaging, and cruel habits.
Surprisingly, Belushi came from a somewhat all-American background. Raised behind a white-picket fence by hardworking and somewhat dour Albanian immigrant parents in the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Belushi was a football player, homecoming king, and class clown who married his high school sweetheart (Judy Belushi-Pisano, who features heavily in the audio recollections). At the same time, though, he was a showoff and natural-born comic with a rebellious streak that resonated perfectly with being a high school student in the mid-1960s. He was the kind of junior comedy nerd who listened obsessively to standup albums and rehearsed different bits in the mirror to get the timing right.
Belushi started out as a theater kid doing summer stock in Indiana and starting an improv comedy troupe in college. Then he discovered improv comedy at Chicago’s Second City, where his physicality and go-for-broke intensity (“He would do anything for a laugh,” recalls castmate Harold Ramis) made him one of the star attractions. He vaulted from there to New York, where joining the “National Lampoon” staff placed him in prime position to be recruited for that groundbreaking first “Saturday Night Live” cast along with fellow Second City and Lampoon alumnae Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, and Chevy Chase. Even though the first season was somewhat of a backward step for the deeply ambitious and verging on arrogant Belushi—Chase’s prat-falling newscaster bits had made him the cast’s big attraction—from there it was a short but hard-lived jump to stardom. When he was cast as Bluto in “Animal House,” it was a role that both secured his fame but also trapped him playing America’s clown.
The clips that Cutler intersperses throughout of Belushi’s work are there not just as a greatest-hits appreciation but to illustrate some aspect of his process. We see how his samurai character came from catching an old movie on TV one night (based on the clip, it appears to have been “Yojimbo”), then using a broomstick as a sword and improvising a guttural gibberish Japanese that prefigure Bill Hader’s mock-Italian Vinny Vedecci sketch. The “cheeburger, cheeburger” sketch was an homage of sorts to Belushi’s dad, who ran a diner in Chicago. Much of what is shown highlights his atom-bomb energy, smashing up sets and wreaking chaos.
Relatively little time is spent on Belushi and Aykroyd’s surprising and deeply weird success as the Blues Brothers (a somewhat daft cover outfit which at least featured a stellar R&B backing band and gave credit to some phenomenal Black stars whose fortunes had faded in the disco era) though one clip from a 1978 show plays behind Ramis mordantly remembering “I don’t think he’ll survive” that level of fame. Cutler uses choppy, noir-style animated segments and to flesh out certain parts of Belushi’s more chaotic biography—voiced in interview segments by Hader—and bring out the roiling undercurrents beneath Belushi’s goofier exterior, fueled by a toxic combination of unaddressed insecurities and cocaine.
The direction that Belushi took following the meteoric success of “Animal House” was utterly predictable—the attention-seeker with hard-to-please parents always looking to replicate the high delivered by an audience doubled over in laughter. Cutler’s entertaining but unexpectedly emotive documentary manages to find the unique angles to his tragedy. This is primarily due to the warm but open-eyed recollections of Judy and friends like Ramis, partner in crime Aykroyd (“we fell in love the moment we met”), and fellow addict Carrie Fisher (“that must have been a screaming hell for him,” she says about his longest period of white-knuckle sobriety). While every addict is to some degree a cliché, those memories help make Belushi more of a person, even as busily trashed his life and that of those around him.
Relatively little time is spent on the post-“Blues Brothers” part of Belushi’s career. The catastrophe that was “Neighbors” is covered in some detail but primarily to show just how out-of-control Belushi’s drug habit had become. While his death cannot help but feel preordained, the gutting way that his friends describe it, particularly a still devastated Aykroyd (who had tried to keep his buddy’s hopes up by saying he was writing a role for him: Peter Venkman in “Ghostbusters”), brings a poignant edge to the waste of Belushi’s end. [B+]
“Belushi” arrives on Showtime on November 22.