Summary
Both a fond look back and a celebration of the enduring nature of Kevin Smith’s career, this documentary is just like its subject: it covers a lot of ground in a compact time.
How do you capture a career as diverse as Kevin Smith’s in a single documentary? From homemade footage to his podcast empire, filmmaker and longtime friend Malcolm Ingram gives it a red hot go. In an affectionate look back at almost 30 years of his life and near death as a creator, Ingram makes a pretty convincing argument for Smith being a true renaissance man.
It’s hard to remember a time when Smith wasn’t part of the pop culture scene, which is perhaps why Ingram opens with shaky camcorder footage from 1992, in which a teary Smith thanks his parents for fostering his love of film. Fast forward to today, and Smith stands atop the IMDB float at Comic Con, having made over a dozen features, as many TV episodes and comic books, and redefined himself as a public speaker and podcast pioneer.
It’s unlikely that Smith devotees are going to find anything especially new in here. After all, Smith’s been describing every inch of his life online and in person for years. Ingram follows a steady path from the glowing reaction of critics at Sundance and SXSW to Clerks (1992), his lack of studio success with Mallrats (1994) and his first indie comeback with Chasing Amy (1997). It’s a pattern that arguably followed him for the rest of his career, as we watch Smith dance tantalisingly close to major commercial success before pivoting to something new. Yet if we learn anything from CLERK, it’s that Kevin Smith is pretty much okay with just being Kevin Smith.
Through a series of new and archival interviews, we get a sense of the sheer scope of the lives and careers Smith’s arc has touched. There’s the inner circle of Brian O’Halloran, Vincent Peirera, Walt Flanagan, Jason Mewes, Bryan Johnson, of course. Then there’s Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Michael Rooker, Penn Jillette and Jason Reitman who all turn up to testify of how their own paths have intersected with Smith’s. An incredibly frail Stan Lee, possibly only months before his passing in 2018, took the time to unhesitatingly sing Smith’s praises. It’s a testament to why people continue wanting to work with Smith — he’s apparently just fun to be around.
To Ingram’s credit, as much attention is paid to Smith’s most recent output. In the wake of Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) — which Smith admits “might have broke his brain” — his high-profile usage of weed is discussed. While it initially led to him directing other people’s work with Cop Out (“Those were dark days,” he says), it also led to him changing tact and launching SMODCast and the dozens of podcasts that followed. It also saw him veer into horror territory with the self-distributed Red State (2011) and Tusk (2014), a body horror film that was inspired by a podcast episode.
It would be impossible to cover the entirety of this film’s scope in a single review. Indeed, we’ve barely mentioned Ingram’s overview of Smith’s comic book career, television shows, and personal life. Not to mention his wife Jennifer and daughter Harley Quinn (both of whom starred in his films), his spoken word tours, the impact of his heart attack, or the online fan base he’s been cultivating since the earliest days of the View Askew website. Ingram instinctively understands that he can’t include everything, and thanks to some judicious editing he manages to pack a lot into a tidy running time.
While this may have been more objective if it had been helmed by someone other than Ingram – indeed, Smith characteristically leads the conversation more often than not – it’s unlikely another filmmaker would have had the same level of access to Smith’s associates. For fans, any opportunity to listen to Smith talk is always a welcome one, and like the back half of his career, one suspects they are the only audience Smith and Ingram care about. As Smith has now become a pop cultural reference himself, with his own Pop Vinyl and a reference to one of his films in Captain Marvel, it’s only appropriate that Smith gets the last word: “I wound up being myself for a living.”
2021 | USA | DIRECTORS: Malcolm Ingram | WRITERS: Malcolm Ingram | CAST: Kevin Smith, Brian O’Halloran, Vincent Peirera, Walt Flanagan, Jason Mewes, Bryan Johnson | DISTRIBUTOR: SXSW 2021 | RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 16-20 March 2021 (USA)
