Still: A Michael J Fox Movie flows with fluid ease through the actor’s life

Much like its subject, this documentary portrait is hard not to like. Made with pep and vim, it flows with fluid ease through the life story of actor Michael J Fox. Wherever possible, footage culled from his relatively short but highly successful career is matched with a voiceover spoken by the man himself. Indeed, we see shots of him recording an audiobook version of his autobiography in that distinctive raspy tone fans of the Back to the Future movies will know well.

But in order to tell Fox’s story, the film engages in some cinematic sleight of hand. To illustrate his early years as a scarily confident and charismatic teenager from Edmonton, Canada trying to make it in Hollywood, what is actually shown is him playing characters in TV shows such as the sitcom Family Ties, which launched him in the early 1980s. Sometimes there are shots of the real Fox flubbing lines or being interviewed, at other times a young actor plays the young actor.

At 61, Fox still looks incredibly young for his age, but his appearance has been altered by the involuntary tremors and loss of motor control caused by Parkinson’s disease. Diagnosed at the height of the fame in 1991, he kept it private until 1998. These days, just walking down the street is a challenge. At one point, the real Fox shows up for an interview with a massive bruise on his head, the result of a collision with some furniture the day before. Trouper that he is, he brushes it off and carries on with the conversation.

Director Davis Guggenheim is keen to show Fox as man without self-pity, who has been to hell but made it back thanks to the love of his family (especially his wife of 35 years Tracy Pollan) and turned his misfortune into charity work for others affected by Parkinson’s. Guggenheim is best known for making promo films to be shown at conventions for the likes of Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and this sometimes feels like another tranche of slickly packaged hagiography. Fox seems every bit a guy we’d all like if we met him, but it seems like hagiography all the same.

★★★☆☆

On Apple TV Plus from May 12