In “Are We Good?,” the director Steven Feinartz tries to bottle one of the country’s most caustic natural resources: the wit and attitude of the comedian and podcaster Marc Maron. The movie includes the standard rundown of career highlights and tributes from friends, but what distinguishes this documentary from a routine life-of-a-comic profile is that Feinartz caught Maron at an especially vulnerable moment, after the sudden death of his partner, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton, in 2020.
Grief is a tricky topic for a comedian. “When do I write a joke?” Maron asks Patton Oswalt, who had gone through a similar experience, on a podcast episode from 2022 that is excerpted in the film. “When does the funny happen?” Maron is shown working through his feelings onstage, telling risky — and often painfully unamusing — jokes about neighbors who sought to console him and even about Shelton herself. (“The difference between a breakup and someone dying,” he says in his act, is that he’s pretty sure she’s not seeing someone else.) Late in the film, he confesses that he is unsure about whether to do a bit that concerns saying goodbye to her in the intensive care unit. That one might cross the line into being disrespectful, he says.
By all accounts, Shelton softened some of Maron’s abrasiveness — “I think something in me relaxed with her finally,” he explains — and the warmth between them in archival material radiates off the screen. Michaela Watkins speaks of Maron’s generosity in processing his loss with his audience, although his penchant for self-baring is nothing new. W. Kamau Bell suggests that the secret of his podcast, “WTF,” which is ending this fall, is that guests are always entering his space; they can’t just promote a movie, but instead have to engage in a real conversation with him.
Maron’s trademark crankiness often shades into sheer nastiness (in the early 1980s, David Cross remarks in the movie, “I was one of a handful of people, there weren’t many, who could tolerate him”), and part of the accomplishment of Feinartz’s film, which at times comes across as too deferential, is that it fitfully succeeds in cracking his shell.
Maron seems as acerbic offstage and off-mic as he is when he is on. Still, he is quite openly playing to Feinartz’s camera. (“You’re going to destroy me with this stupid movie,” he says at the outset.) And in moments — as when he interacts with his father, whose dementia diagnosis he makes light of onstage — Maron comes across as someone with a well-hidden tender side. His work ethic, which finds him still doing standup when he could be hiding from audiences, is impressive. Like it or not, Maron is putting himself out there.
Are We Good?
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.
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