Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Just how polished does a career-spanning documentary about the anarchic underground filmmaker behind “Greaser’s Palace” and “Putney Swope” need to be?
If you’ve seen any of Robert Downey’s films, the answer is obviously: not very. You might even say, the scrappier the better.
So goes the thinking behind “Sr.,” a loose seemingly seat-of-your-pants portrait of the antiestablishment director (perhaps best known for siring “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr.) that sneaks up on ya, emotionally speaking, seeing as how it doubles as a kind of farewell exercise between the two generations (plus grandson Exton) in the months before Downey succumbed to Parkinson’s Disease. “Oddly, it’s sort of what your family does.
You guys make art of your lives,” analyzes Junior’s therapist fairly late in the process, not long before dad’s passing. There’s no question that’s what’s really going on in an incredibly unconventional documentary that was ostensibly directed by Chris Smith (“American Movie,” “Fyre”), but hijacked along the way by its subject, who can’t resist the impulse to make his own version of the movie we’re watching.
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