“We had no overt agenda about this project,” says Robert Downey Jr, at the end of the curiously-punctuated “Sr.”. A heartfelt, homemade documentary years in the making, it’s Downey Jr’s attempt to mark the life and career of his father, the experimental filmmaker Robert Downey Sr (who died in 2021 during filming, aged 85) — to capture his ageing, ailing dad for posterity. But as you might expect from two filmmaking titans, it has a clear artist’s approach, a film as much about filmmakers and filmmaking and the artistic process as it is a home movie-esque tribute.
There is a strange, meta quality to it. We watch footage of Downey Jr, playing with his kids, loving them 3000; then we watch Downey Sr, watching that same footage on a TV while offering notes, well into his 80s and clearly suffering from the effects of Parkinson’s, but his directorial eye still focused and sharp. “Good shot, great movement,” he observes. Later, Downey Sr travels to various locations that formed his early, transgressive experimental films on the streets of New York, stalking his own ghost, and is given free rein of the footage that emerges; we are shown Sr’s own edit of the film, effectively puppet-mastering his own eulogy.
Chris Smith shows sensitivity and care in cataloguing Downey Sr’s remarkable, rebellious career and his present-day life.
Both men have very specific thoughts about what the long-gestating film should be, swapping notes on everything from shot composition to the title itself. Some filmmakers might reasonably feel their voice being squeezed out in the face of huge personalities, but director Chris Smith has previous experience in making films about films (see also: American Movie, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond), and he shows sensitivity and care in cataloguing Downey Sr’s remarkable, rebellious career and his present-day life. Shot in crisp black-and-white, peppered with archive clips (there’s footage of Downey Jr’s first film appearance in 1970’s Pound, aged five, all blonde locks and big eyes), Smith presents it all as an unconventional family portrait.
There’s a lovely dynamic between the father and son, too: Jr wears his heart on his sleeve, dreamy and nostalgic about growing up on film sets (“I got used to falling asleep to the sound of clapper boards,” he says), while remaining level-headed about his dad’s permissiveness with drink and drugs from a young age. Sr, meanwhile, retains a sprightly rebelliousness to the end, and there’s an element of cat-and-mouse in the son’s chase to learn more about his old man, to penetrate his puckish exterior. The result is more interesting and unusual than you might expect from such a personal, navel-gazey project.