On an economic storytelling level, HBO’s terrific and delightful new documentary series, “Painting With John,” begins with a brilliantly simple and effective little riff. Starring renaissance man John Lurie—a renowned actor known for his work in classic Jim Jarmusch films, a musician, filmmaker, author, poet, and now, mostly a painter— who stars, writes, directs, and produces the entire endeavor, “Painting With John” immediately deconstructs the myth of Bob Ross, the famously soothing and gentle 1970s/‘80s television watercolorist who brought the joy of DIY painting to the masses and into homes across the nation, and of which Lurie’s show most resembles on the surface. Not everyone can paint, says Lurie, obliterating the fable gently, “It’s not true.”
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And Lurie’s six-part doc series is nothing like Ross’ show—ostensibly meant to teach painting to curious newbies—but it is instructive in its circuitous life lessons and features a similar calming and hypnotic quality, albeit much deeper, more profound yet meandering, and funnier. Lurie uses Ross to immediately dispel the notion that his is an analogous painting show and sets the stage for some absolutely compelling, deep, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes sad, but always absorbing storytelling about his difficult existence and life general.
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As Lurie tells it, everyone can paint, as a child, and then life slowly beats out the purity of creativity through rules, regulations, policies, and suffering that hurt and hinder imagination.
Mileage may vary for a show that may appear slow and strange to the outsider. It certainly helps to know and enjoy the brilliant mind of John Lurie, an artisan of the highest order, a raconteur, and creative polymath who has jumped around to several fields and never once resembled a touristic dilettante (this new series is also something of a spiritual successor to his oddball, utterly brilliant ‘90s TV series “Fishing With John,” which you should definitely know, but it’s also a different, more deliberate kind of beast).
It is imbued with melancholy and ravaged wisdom. It certainly helps to know the now 68-year-old’s backstory; a prolific artist who essentially disappeared in the early ’00s after suffering a string of what he calls bad fortune that befell him, lightly suggesting perhaps from karmic transgressions he made against the universe. Lurie suffered a debilitating Lyme disease diagnosis that left him unable to act, make music, or create, and endured an excruciating stalking incident, written up in an infamous New Yorker article, that has forever made the magazine his loathed bête noire (I don’t dare risk linking to it without further incurring his wrath). On top of it all, Lurie casually reveals during the show that sometime between 2000 and 2021, two decades when he mostly vanished from the public eye, he also recovered from an undisclosed cancer diagnosis. His outwardly charming show about painting, philosophy, life and more, is shrouded in mystery and pain.
Not much of Lurie’s legend is really mentioned, or directly discussed, but it permeates the show and is often inherently referenced. Lurie lives on a remote, small, undisclosed Caribbean island, for example, (it’s unknown where he lives outside of his friends). The mysteriousness of it all definitely feels attributed to his stalking incident which he dances around in conversations about the hell and tortures of fame (one story in particular about the nature of celebrity and friendship with Anthony Bourdain is heartbreaking).
While the show is superficially hilariously deadpan, droll, features laugh-out-loud non-sequiturs and typically bizarre John Lurie stories— he is hysterical, frankly, but in a Sahara dry manner— anecdotes and tall tales, it’s also subtly suffused with the great sorrow the past twenty years have given him in the form of illness and self-imposed incarceration.
And for all this, “Painting With John” is simply a show about a man telling stories, mostly within his house, while painting (intensely vivid, sometimes nightmarish paintings that would need another 1,000 words to describe properly; though “None of the trees in my paintings are happy. They’re all miserable,” is a pretty apt quote). Sometimes he plays with his aerial camera drone, includes his amiable housekeepers in the wandering stories, and occasionally, his inner clown comes out, and Lurie goes outside to monkey around with things like the joys of throwing a tire down a hill and letting it smash into something.
If the setting seems dull and does on the surface, rest assured that Lurie is a magnetic, intense presence with the spellbinding gift of gab. His stories are often random cul-de-sacs, some going nowhere punctuated by absurdist humor (one involving Barry White and a boner is pretty damn good, even unfulfilled), some going long, full of mournful feeling and regret, but always immensely human.
Lurie has the uncanny ability to go from the poetic and profound to the childish and inane, and back to deep melancholy within the span of one episode or one long yarn. He’ll reference Mighty Mouse and then John Coltrane, but perhaps what’s most important is how both of these figures are essentially given equal weight because both loom gigantic in his mind. After all, both have offered such gigantic joys in his life.
Lurie’s inner child comes out a lot too, both directly in stories about his childhood (a few will likely make you cry in their wisdom from his unnaturally kind and empathetic 1950s-set parents), and indirectly about his admiration for the purity of children and the way the mischievousness little rascal inside this nearly-70-year-old-man has not waned. Lurie may not tell the viewer to get into a little mischief and trouble every single day, but it feels understood in the arch of his roguish eyebrows.
For all its insightful observations about the human condition, discursive accounts and weird, strange folklores, intrinsic dolor, and soulful deep bellyache laughter it produces, “Painting With John,” ultimately for some—for me, anyhow—is like the warm embrace from a best friend you haven’t seen in years and all the spiritual emotion and baggage that unlodges. With apologies to Mr. Scorsese (though he and Fran come close) and everyone who has released something brilliant so far, John Lurie is back (hopefully to stay?) and has released the most profoundly captivating narrative of 2021, so far. [A+]
“Painting With John” debuts on HBO and HBO Max on January 22.