Although Robert Downey Jr. is currently one of the most famous actors on the planet, he reminds the audience early in the new documentary “Sr.”— about his late father Robert Downey Sr.— that for many years, he was simply just known as “Bob Downey’s kid.” Which is ostensibly the impetus of “Sr.,” directed by celebrated documentarian Chris Smith (“American Movie”), yet, essentially hosted and presented by RDJ, to put his father in proper cinematic and historical context. Downey Sr. was a raucous indie, arthouse experimentalist, a cult figure and trailblazer who started making bizarre DIY counter-culture films before those scenes were even a twinkle in the eyes of the modern American filmmaking landscape.
Playfully told with an irreverent spirit fitting of his father’s rascally non-linear films, “Sr.,” is deeply engaging and entertaining. But it’s intimately candid and exposed too, saving its most heartfelt moments for its touching and emotional final act.
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Decades before Jr.’s breakout star status, before his notorious wild period, and then before his triumphant comeback as a Marvel hero, Robert Downey Sr. was disrupting the status quo of cinema with his lo-fi cinematic experiments on New York’s Bowery in the 1960s. The late avante-garde filmmaker and cineaste Jonas Mekas once described Downey Sr.’s discursive films as a “collage of absurdities,” and that’s an apt description. Best known for “Putney Swope” (1969), a savagely satirical and indicting comedy about the advertising industry, race in Hollywood and corporate corruption, and “Greaser’s Palace” (1972), essentially a surrealist Jesus story and LSD Western, Downey Sr. directed dozens of films throughout his career, but the first two decades of filmmaking were wildly and willfully cheeky; rebellious and resistant to form and narrative. Downey Sr. seemingly never met a convention he didn’t feel like he could upend and break.
Seemingly aligned with Dada-ism, too much caffeine, possibly amphetamines, a confidence in his unusual rhythms and a mischievously maverick and eccentric streak, films like “Chafed Elbows” (1966) were mostly comprised of still photographs to tell the story; about an oddball who marries his mother and then goes on welfare. A bizarre, “ode to Oedipus,“ Jr. says. “No More Excuses” (1968) was a quasi-doc about Manhattan’s singles scene, “Pound” (1970) brazenly told the story of a group of animals in a cage waiting to be euthanized, played by actors (featuring Jr. in his first onscreen appearance at the age of five), and “Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight” (1975) was notoriously plotless and nonsensical (Btw, Criterion’s Eclipse Series 33: Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr., is a terrific primer for all that essential early work).
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Yet, “Sr.” is just as interested in the man as it is his insouciant movies, and while the filmography is interwoven throughout the narrative, the doc never forgets to provide the contextual personality and approach to art—always roguish, usually challenging and often patently unruly. Though a little inscrutable as a person—seemingly to both the amusement and eternal frustration of his son who’s come to terms with the peculiarities of dad—Sr. himself is otherwise generally lively, inquisitive and always in possession of a great dry wit.
Throughout the unconventional portrait, the perpetually disobedient and recalcitrant Sr., though good-natured too, is seen defying the director, his son, and anything resembling instruction. Fitting for the ever-curious and experimental artist, Downey Sr. directs a few scenes and even suggests they should make dueling docs—the Downey/Smith version and the “Sr. Cut,” scenes of which are shown within the doc in a perfectly magnificent meta fashion.
Eventually, three tracks emerge from the shapeshifting doc, of father, son, and holy wow spirit: the meta-playful side—the filmography and biography with all its brilliance and tragedies—Sr.’s typically more anarchic version of the doc, and Downey Jr. wrestling with the idea of intimacy, fully realizing his dad’s health is failing and these precious final moments might be their last.
Downey Sr. famously received a minor career boost in the ‘90s and ‘00s when he befriended filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who would always enthusiastically sing the praises of Sr.’s films to anyone that would listen. “Bob doesn’t seem to be that worried about confusing the audience, and that’s why it’s great,” Anderson says in archival interview footage with the late Jonathan Demme. “You either get with it or you don’t, but I’m smitten with it.”
“It’s no secret that Paul Thomas Anderson is the son my dad wishes he would have had,” RDJ says self-deprecatingly with a grin. “And they like to rub that in my face.” Though PTA doesn’t appear, some of his personal archival footage does, including taking a train ride with Sr. who was afraid of flying after surviving two plane crashes.
There’s an old African proverb that says, “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground,” a lifetime of memory, experiences, wisdom and knowledge just vanishes into the nothing of it all. And it’s where Downey Jr. finds himself near the end of the doc, knowing the futility of fully capturing the art and the person, and the deep melancholy of how it’s all about to end.
Grappling with the knowledge that life is coming to a close for his father, Downey Jr. asks the camera rhetorically about the doc he’s making. “Is it a contemplation of death? I think it is, but not in a morose way, just in a, ‘we’re here, we do things and then we’re gone.’” The soulful bittersweetness on display is deeply moving and poignant, and for the eternally quipping and quick-witted Robert Downey Jr., it’s actually maybe the most vulnerable he’s ever been on screen. Bob might be gone, but everyone involved should be proud; it’s a beautiful tribute and a wonderful farewell to a legend, father, and artist. [A-]
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