This is a really engaging, well-made, and reflective documentary about the life of John Kennedy Toole. It's a little less than an hour long, but it manages to give a satisfying account of Toole's life and work, focusing especially on his final years, his suicide, and his mother's subsequent efforts to get his novel published. It's informative, smart, and surprisingly touching.
John Kennedy Toole, if you don't know, wrote A Confederacy of Dunces, a brilliant novel about New Orleans, in the mid-1960s. It's a comedic masterpiece about Ignatius J. Reilly, a hyper-educated slob who still lives with his mom and can't get a job. It's my favorite novel about the city I grew up in, and one of my favorite novels overall. Toole never managed to publish it during his life, however, and eventually committed suicide. Over a decade after his suicide, his mother went on a crusade to get the novel published, and it ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize when it finally did come out.
This documentary traces Toole's life from birth to death. The makers have managed to come up with a good deal of archival photographs and letters and other documents of Toole's life, and many of these are strung together by the excellent voice-over narration. There are also a few interviews in the film with Toole scholars (several of them local to New Orleans) and people who knew Toole personally. The film does a great job of assembling all these materials into a single, coherent narrative of the man's life and death. We also see a good bit of footage of his mother, from her appearances in various places after she succeeded in publishing the novel. The film focuses a great deal of interpretation on the relationship between Toole and his mother, which makes sense given the evidence. The movie also pays some attention to New Orleans itself as a constant factor in Toole's life.
This is a relatively low-budget production, and at the moment is only available online. It's worth seeking out whether you've already read Confederacy or are only planning to. (It's a novel everyone should read at some point.) I learned a lot from this movie, and it would be a very valuable reference point for anyone who wants to write or talk about the novel or its author.