Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie portrays a man in constant motion

Michael J. Fox has been in the public eye since he was a teenager, but there’s a still lot to be gleaned in this revealing documentary.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is streaming now. Picture: Apple TV+

Michael J. Fox has lived his life in public since he was a kid on Canadian TV. From his international superstardom to his advocacy for Parkinson’s disease research, you might think there’s little you don’t know about him.

So, what could a documentary, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie tell you that you didn’t already know?

Not even that the J in Michael J. Fox doesn’t stand for anything – that’s already known. Yeah, fun fact if you didn’t know, Fox’s middle name is Andrew and he didn’t want to be Michael A. Fox when plain old Michael Fox was already taken. J is a nod to actor Michael J. Pollard.

The point of Still isn’t to be revelatory in the traditional sense. But it does give you a renewed understanding of who Fox is, his incredible rise, the dark years of keeping his secret from everyone, and how that eventual openness freed him.

It’s also a stark portrait of how Parkinson’s manifests, how it robs someone of control of their physicality. Fox’s hands shake, his legs give in, there’s a large bruise on his face, which he explains he got when he fell over. He falls over a lot.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie Picture: Apple TV+

Perhaps you think there’s a perverse irony in titling the documentary Still, now that Fox no longer can be still. But the word is making a link between when Fox was go-go-go in his younger years, and then go-go-go in running away from himself when he was diagnosed, until now, when he no longer has that choice.

Maybe he’s never had a choice, propelled as he was by his ambition, his hunger to do more, to be more.

In the present day, a doctor tells Fox to slow down as he struggles to walk down a hallway. It contrasts with everything that was presented in the first hour of the doco, of the man who once made five movies in three years.

Fox is definitely older, battered and lined, but he still has that youthful energy, that impish face which helped him nab those roles when he first started, playing much younger than he was.

It belies his weary maturity, shaped by decades of earnt clarity, recalling the life-changing moment of his father’s death or the realisation of what it really meant when he once joked his wife was a single parent.

Michael J. Fox with his family. Picture: Apple TV+

Directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, He Named Me Malala), Still makes heavy use of archival footage of Fox’s work, intercut with his piece-to-camera interviews and overlaid with the actor’s voiceover narration.

The clips serve dual purpose. The first reminds you of the breadth of his work beyond Family Ties and Back to the Future, and just what a prodigious comedic actor he was – the preciseness of his timing and the strength of his presence.

The other is the clips were chosen to piece together and illustrate the story Fox is telling you now. When he recalls his reaction to his Parkinson’s diagnosis at the age of 29, of his escaping into alcohol or taking on more movie productions overseas, it’s aligned with scenes of Fox running, screaming or drinking in his films.

A clip of his Mars Attacks character racing through the chaos of a scene takes on a different meaning. Fox is a man in constant motion, in one way or another.

And Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is a documentary in constant motion, and just like the older Fox, it knows when to stop, pause and take it all in.

Rating: 3.5/5

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is streaming now on Apple TV+

Originally published as Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie portrays a man in constant motion