After years feeling like an outsider, Joe Jennings found that falling was his calling. The soft-spoken star of the curious documentary “Space Cowboy” has thrived as a skydiving cinematographer, filming extreme sports and staging midair tableaus with plummeting cars and other objects. But the flip side to success was clinical depression, as the directors Marah Strauch and Bryce Leavitt sensitively show.
Scorned as “Joe Dirt” as a kid with hippie hair, Jennings warmed to jumping from planes as an adult and learned the art of filming amid the clouds. He chronicled the champion skysurfer Rob Harris as the X Games kicked off in the 1990s. Then he made ads imagining airborne pizza delivery and staged stunts for the movies “Charlie’s Angels” (2000) and “xXx” (2002).
Calm but intensely focused, Jennings seems like a guy you’d trust to film you while you’re hurtling to earth. “Space Cowboy” toggles between his career history, his relationships with his wife and sons, and his current project: filming himself skydiving seated in an open-top car. Jennings talks about the depression that immobilized him at times and the tragedy that struck his buddy Harris, before returning to troubleshooting his latest jump.
It’s an unexpected illustration of how psychiatric challenges can turn one’s life into a “shrinking world,” as Jennings puts it, and how to keep going. All the same, one does wish for more context on the car stunt (which is both neato and baffling), and more extensive clips of his feats. But kudos to Jennings for sharing the mettle required for free-falls, whether external or internal.
Space Cowboy Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
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