In the same way that business reporters confuse wealth with genius, talking-head showbiz documentaries tend to confuse fame with genius. It makes sense: for MBAs, money is God; for actors and for many filmmakers, fame is God. To become as famous as Charlie Sheen, or as wealthy as Bernie Madoff, is proof of merit and divine favor.
This showbiz documentary has a staggering number of famous faces; right out of the gate, you're shocked and awed by the number of celebrities who worked with the movie's subject, Del Close.
But the next revelation is that so few of these famous comedians are actually funny: we know them either from their iconic performances in excellent scripted comedies (e.g., Bill Murray), for their so-so performances in so-so scripted comedies (Chris Farley), or, most often, for their mediocre roles in mediocre scripted comedies and dismal shows like SNL. The clips of their live comedy presented in For Madmen Only are, literally without exception (no: literally), depressingly unfunny.
Even if we like those people (I really like Tim Meadows, for instance), we admire them as actors or as skilled caricaturists, not as perpetrators of dated, annoying live comedy. Their charisma preceded and was independent of their time in improv. You might say that their charisma survived their time in improv.
The few truly clever people in this movie's parade of stars (e.g., Tina Fey, Harold Ramis) are gifted primarily as writers. And their writing styles have, at best, a hidden resemblance to the annoying improv theater that Del Close pioneered.
Like most documentaries about comedians, For Madmen Only is an assemblage of clips of people either 1) not being funny or interesting, or 2) talking soberly about how funny and interesting they are. Whether the movie is about Lenny Bruce, Bruce Willis, or Bruce Vilanch, a documentary like this will inevitably consist of 90 minutes of faded TV stars saying things like "Bruce was a revolutionary, a true pioneer, but his electric intelligence was also dangerous. He changed the world." (Never mind the fact that, in 2021, comedians' main functions in society are to distract the peasants with Paul-Blart pratfalls, to pay the wealthy unearned compliments for their aloof knowingness, and to disseminate propaganda on behalf of oligarchs.)
Improv is a form that's perfectly suited to our unreflective era: the era of social media and personality disorders, of lifelong swimming in the shallow end of the pool. Audiences have been trained to think of improv as "a fun night out" and to laugh on cue, even though improv is almost always cringe-inducingly loud and stupid. (I've been dragged to see at least a dozen "award-winning improv troupes," and I've never caught an entertaining or thought-provoking show. The audience laughs and applauds out of politeness, the same way a live audience might do at a Late Show or Tonight Show taping.) It's a theatrical form that exists more for the people onstage than for the people in the audience.
The movie definitely convinces the viewer that Del Close was a drug addict and compulsive liar with delusions of grandeur who played guru to a revolving door of talented and untalented careerists. It fails to convince the viewer that Close was brilliant. He was the kind of guy, perhaps, who could pass for brilliant in the world of actors or of adult comic-book enthusiasts. His deep thoughts were either dorm-room Dadaism or Synanon/Tony-Robbins self-help pablum.
The filmmakers, embarrassingly, treat a shameful lie that Close apparently told for years about his father's suicide as an example of a master artist fumbling toward the expression of a greater truth. What, though, is so deeply true about Close's gruesome, improbable tale? Close's stories have none of the humor of one of David Sedaris's embellished essays, none of the absurd magic of a Stephen Wright set, none of the jewel-like observations of a Spalding Gray monologue, and none of the depth of well-crafted fiction.
For Madmen Only is so boilerplate, it barely exists as an individual film, but if there's one movie it reminds me of, it's the much better Supermensch (which was, itself, a pale imitation of The Kid Stays In The Picture). It's a movie made by, for, and about narcissists who can't imagine any accomplishment more profound than being acquainted with a lot of people like themselves.
One irony I appreciated is the fact that, nine months from now, when people inevitably start getting cancelled as ableists for having referred to mental illness as "craziness," "madness," or "insanity," 99% of the celebrities interviewed in this movie (which is full of talk about "mad/crazy/insane" artists in "asylums") will join in the online mobbing of the latest wave of retroactively guilty thought and speech criminals.
Well: celebrity sucks and celebrities suck. Good comedy can be a salve in a confusing and painful world, but For Madmen Only has almost nothing to do with good comedy.
Finally: documentarians: all of you: please stop asking your composers to rip off Philip Glass. Yes, Glass is associated with the great documentaries of Errol Morris and Godfrey Reggio. But you can't plagiarize Glass/Morris/Reggio so brazenly. Use pre-recorded music or hire composers who don't mindlessly imitate the work of better artists.
