Thursday, July 26, 2018

'Come Inside My Mind' and the New Wave of Gone-Too-Soon Documentaries


Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind played on HBO recently, looking at the comic's legacy and tragic end. It's a good movie ... but it sure felt a lot like Amy ... and Whitney ... and The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling ... and so on. For Rolling Stone, I wrote about this recent wave of documentaries memorializing artists who died too soon. In my essay, I note, "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but troubled artists get a one-size-fits-all misery to represent their complicated existence. Are all visionary, anguished performers essentially the same? Or does it help us, the audience, if we believe that?"

You can read it here.