“I’m not pathetic,” declares actor turned activist Michael J Fox early on in this intimate, uplifting and frequently very funny documentary about his life. “I’ve got shit going on. I’m a tough son of a bitch.” On the evidence presented here – a dazzling collage of interviews, dramatisations, snappily chosen film and TV clips, family footage and narrated biography – it’s hard to disagree.
Having achieved stardom in his early 20s, Fox found himself in his 30s hiding from, and then publicly facing up to, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease – a condition that he believed (as many do) only affected older people. As he says with genuine surprise: “I was not someone who was supposed to get this.” Yet as we learn from this wryly defiant portrait by Davis Guggenheim, whose documentary CV includes the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and the empowering He Named Me Malala: “Some people would view the news of my disease as an ending, but I was starting to sense that it was really a beginning.”
