Bryan Johnson, the wealthy tech entrepreneur at the center of “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever,” has made a mission out of trying to “neutralize” his aging process. Every day, he engages in a hyper-regimented body care routine that will, in theory, help him maintain the physical condition of someone much younger than his years. (He is now 47.) This too-chummy documentary, promoted on Johnson’s website, offers the more familiar reverse sensation of having 90 minutes of your life taken from you. By the time it’s over, you will be older, a progression that if anything the movie feels like it hastens.
A great deal of Johnson’s protocol consists of taking ordinary medical advice (eating a healthy diet, getting a good night’s sleep) to robotic extremes. He lives by an algorithm designed to give his body what it needs, when it needs it, independent of what his mind tells him he wants. If people panic at the concept of giving up free will, he says, that’s a “knee-jerk reaction.” He adds, “The conscious mind is desperate to hold on to power.”
If turning off your mental functions sounds like advice more suited to a cult than a wellness plan, critics charge that that sort of belief system is closer to what Johnson is promoting. What he does to his body frankly doesn’t look great, either. He tells Talmage, his son, that he’s going to take 130 pills in one day. Talmage and Johnson’s father, Richard, join him in a plasma exchange that the documentary creepily portrays as an intergenerational bonding exercise. Johnson flies off to Honduras for experimental gene therapy.
The flaw in his strategy is that combining so many different treatments is not only potentially dangerous but also makes it impossible to know what is working. “It’s not science,” says Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, a professor of medicine at Harvard who is interviewed in the documentary. “It’s just attention.” And the director, Chris Smith, doesn’t effectively account for how irritating it is to watch such a willing oversharer, especially one who is hawking dietary supplements, merchandise and even branded olive oil. If Johnson is, as his detractors contend, more of a salesman than a medical visionary, then Smith is simply aiding his pitch.
The director has worked with monomaniacal camera subjects before; his best-loved film, “American Movie” (1999), revolves around a D.I.Y. filmmaker, Mark Borchardt, with a quixotic drive to pursue his goofy vision. But if there’s anything lighthearted about Johnson, who devotes an extraordinary portion of his life to obsessive self-monitoring, Smith hasn’t captured it.
Faced with the problem of humanizing a man who aspires to cheat a fundamental aspect of human existence, Smith settles for a banal father-son arc. Johnson, who left the Mormon Church, has complicated relationships with his family, and Talmage, characterized as the child who is closest to him, is a high school senior. Even an anti-aging guru can’t prevent his kid from going away to college.
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