One of the biggest stars in the world, you know Robert Downey Jr. In every conceivable metric on Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, Wikipedia, ranking the highest-ranking lifetime actor grosses at the box office, or bankability, Downey Jr. is always at or near the top. But perhaps some modern-day audiences have forgotten that Downey Jr. is arthouse movie royalty and his father, Robert Downey Sr., was a renegade counterculture filmmaker throughout the 1960s and 1970s, making lo-fi, DYI, independent cinema before most people considered it an alternative option to the mainstream.
Known for rebellious, irreverent, experimental, and gonzo movies like “Putney Swope” (1969), “Greaser’s Palace” (1972”), and Mad Magazine’s “Up the Academy” (1980), Downey Sr. never really earned mainstream success. But thanks to film historians and admirers like Paul Thomas Anderson—who championed his work in the ’90s, giving him a part in “Boogie Nights” and ushering in a new era for him—and the Criterion Collection who released an essential Eclipse box set of his work in 2012, Downey Sr.’s profane, mischievous, trailblazing work earned its rightful due in the pantheon of cinema.
Downey Sr. passed away in the summer of 2021, but not before filmmaker Chris Smith (“American Movie”) and Robert Downey Jr. could profile and celebrate him in the upcoming documentary “Sr.” Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this year, the doc was quickly snatched up by Netflix and is coming out in December.
Of the film we wrote in our review, “playfully told with an irreverent spirit fitting of his father’s rascally nonlinear 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.”
Part history lesson, putting Downey Sr.’s irascible work in proper context, the movie is also an intimate and vulnerable look at Downey Jr. coming to terms with his father, grappling with his old age and illness (Parkinson’s), and learning to love him warts and all and forgive their troubled past.
Here’s the official synopsis:
From documentarian Chris Smith (American Movie) comes a lovingly irreverent portrait of the life, career, and last days of maverick filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., whose rebellious spirit infused decades of counterculture movie-making. “Sr.” widens the lens from Downey’s art to the life with which it was deeply intertwined, including an intimate examination of his relationship with son Robert Downey, Jr. Shot over the course of three years, the film truly honors Senior’s nonlinear, outlaw-life approach, including capturing his decision to embark on his own concurrent and final film project. Smith’s portrait of a family and an artist is a meditation on life that’s as surreal as it is sentimental, a celebration of making art with no rules that tosses out its own rulebook along the way.
“Sr.” also played at the New York Film Festival and the AFI Film Festival and arrives on Netflix on December 2. It’s a lovely, heartfelt, wistful, and super charismatic doc worth checking out. Watch the trailer below.