The Irony of Steve Martin’s Life Isn’t Lost on Him

Steve Martin, a cast member in "Only Murders in the Building," poses at the second season premiere of the Hulu series at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles on June 27, 2022. (AP)
Steve Martin, a cast member in "Only Murders in the Building," poses at the second season premiere of the Hulu series at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles on June 27, 2022. (AP)
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The Irony of Steve Martin’s Life Isn’t Lost on Him

Steve Martin, a cast member in "Only Murders in the Building," poses at the second season premiere of the Hulu series at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles on June 27, 2022. (AP)
Steve Martin, a cast member in "Only Murders in the Building," poses at the second season premiere of the Hulu series at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles on June 27, 2022. (AP)

Steve Martin has long marveled at the many phases of his life. There’s his youth as a Disneyland performer, surrounded by vaudeville performers and magicians. A decade as a stand-up before the sudden onset of stadium-sized popularity. An abrupt shift to movies. Later, a new chapter as a banjo player, a father and, a comedy act, once again, with Martin Short.

It’s such a confounding string of chapters that Martin has typically only approached his life piecemeal or schizophrenically. He titled an audiobook “So Many Steves.” His memoir, “Born Standing Up,” covered only his stand-up years. In it, he wrote that it was really a biography “because I am writing about someone I used to know.”

“My life has many octopus arms,” Martin says, speaking from his New York apartment.

People participate in documentaries for all kinds of reasons. But Martin may be unique in making a film about his life with the instruction of: “See if you can make sense of all THAT.” Morgan Neville, the documentary filmmaker of the Fred Rogers film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and the posthumous Anthony Bourdain portrait “Roadrunner,” took up the challenge.

Yet Neville, too, was hesitant about any holistic view of Martin. The resulting film is really two. “STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+, splits Martin’s story in two halves. One depicts Martin’s stand-up as it unfolded, with copious contributions from journal entries and old photographs. The other captures Martin’s life as it is today — riding electric bikes with Short, practicing the banjo — with reflections on the career that followed.

It’s an attempt to synthesize all the Steve Martins, or at least line them up next to each other. The “King Tut” guy with the arrow through his head. The “wild and crazy guy.” The “Jerk.” The Grammy-winner. The novel writer. And the self-lacerating comic who says in the film: “I guarantee I had no talent. None.”

“Just because you do a lot of things doesn’t mean they’re good,” Martin says. I know that time evaluates things. So there’s nothing for me to stand on to evaluate my efforts. But an outsider can make sense of it.”

Neville, who joined the video call from his home in Pasadena, California, didn’t set out to make two films about Martin. But six months into the process, it crystalized for him as the right structure. Through lines emerged.

“When I look at the things Steve’s done in his life — playing banjo, magic, stand-up — these are things that take great effort to master,” Neville says. “But in a way, it’s the constant working at it. Even seeing Steve pick up a banjo, it’s never, ‘I nailed it.’ It’s always: ‘I could do that a little better.’”

Looking back hasn’t come naturally to Martin. He’s long resisted the kind of life-story treatment of a film like “STEVE!” But Martin, 78, grants he’s now at that time of life where you can’t help it. Even if reliving some things smarts.

“The first part, that’s what I really have a hard time watching,” Martin says. “When I’m on black-and-white homemade video being so not funny.”

Martin grew up in Orange County in awe of Jerry Lewis, Laurel and Hardy and Nichols and May. His first job, as an 11-year-old, was selling guide books at Disneyland. He drifted toward the Main Street Magic Shop. Stage performers like Wally Boag became his idols.

When Martin, after studying philosophy in college and writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” began stand-up, he drew copiously from Boag and others, filtering the showmanship of vaudeville into an avantgarde act, just with balloon animals and an arrow through his head. Donning the persona of, as he says in the film, “a comedian who thinks he’s funny but isn’t,” his routine moved away from punchlines and toward an absurd irony with “free-form laughter.”

Martin’s act was groundbreaking and, in the 1970s, when most comics were doing political material, it became wildly popular. “He’s up there with the most idolized comedians ever,” Jerry Seinfeld says in the film. Now, Martin doesn’t see much from those years that makes him laugh.

“Then there are these moments that I think of as performance glory, but they last a minute or two minutes,” Martin says. It was all so new. It was exciting because it was new to the audience and to me.”

In 1981, Martin quit stand-up, he thought for good. The act had run its course and he was happy to transition to movies. It wasn’t until decades later, when Martin prepared to tour as a banjo player, that a friend convinced him audiences were going to want a little banter in between songs.

“So I had this terror and I started working on material,” Martin says. “Eventually I became what I grew up with, which is a folk music act with a funny monologist, making funny intros to songs.”

That’s bled into Martin’s unexpected return to stand-up. Martin and Short, friends since the 1986 comedy “Three Amigos!” have become the premier double act of today, starring on the acclaimed Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” and performing on the road. They cuttingly but affectionately volley quip after quip with the finesse of Grand Slam champions.

The irony isn’t lost on Martin. The no-punchline comedian has become a lover of punchlines.

“I’ve morphed into a person who really appreciates the joy of telling jokes,” shrugs Martin. “Marty and I in our show is joke after joke after joke.”

Martin likes to say he has a “relaxed mind” now. He’s peeled away a lot — competitiveness, people or situations who brought him grief — and has narrowed his life down to things that matter most to him.

“I have this thing that I’ve noticed,” Martin says. “As we age, we either become our best selves or our worst selves. I’ve seen people become their worst selves and I’ve seen people who were tough, difficult people early on become better selves.”



Movie Review: ‘Piece by Piece,’ a Very Odd Lego Doc about Pharrell Williams Snaps Together Somehow

 This image released by Focus Features shows lego characters voiced by Jay-Z, left, and Pharrell Williams, in a scene from "Piece By Piece." (Focus Features via AP)
This image released by Focus Features shows lego characters voiced by Jay-Z, left, and Pharrell Williams, in a scene from "Piece By Piece." (Focus Features via AP)
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Movie Review: ‘Piece by Piece,’ a Very Odd Lego Doc about Pharrell Williams Snaps Together Somehow

 This image released by Focus Features shows lego characters voiced by Jay-Z, left, and Pharrell Williams, in a scene from "Piece By Piece." (Focus Features via AP)
This image released by Focus Features shows lego characters voiced by Jay-Z, left, and Pharrell Williams, in a scene from "Piece By Piece." (Focus Features via AP)

A movie documentary that uses only Lego pieces might seem an unconventional choice. When that documentary is about renowned musician-producer Pharrell Williams, it's actually sort of on-brand.

“Piece by Piece” is a bright, clever song-filled biopic that pretends it's a behind-the-scenes documentary using small plastic bricks, angles and curves to celebrate an artist known for his quirky soul. It is deep and surreal and often adorable. Is it high concept or low? Like Williams, it's a bit of both.

Director Morgan Neville — who has gotten more and more experimental exploring other celebrity lives like Fred Rogers in “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” and “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces” — this time uses real interviews but masks them under little Lego figurines with animated faces. Call this one a documentary in a million pieces.

The filmmakers try to explain their device — “What if nothing is real? What if life is like a Lego set?” Williams says at the beginning — but it's very tenuous. Just submit and enjoy the ride of a poor kid from Virginia Beach, Virginia, who rose to dominate music and become a creative director at Louis Vuitton.

Williams, by his own admission, is a little detached, a little odd. Music triggers colors in his brain — he has synesthesia, beautifully portrayed here — and it's his forward-looking musical brain that will make him a star, first as part of the producing team The Neptunes and then as an in-demand solo producer and songwriter.

There are highs and lows and then highs again. A verse Williams wrote for “Rump Shaker” by Wreckx-N-Effect when he was making a living selling beats would lead to superstars demanding to work with him and partner Chad Hugo — Kendrick Lamar, Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott and Jay-Z. All those superstars sit for interviews and have hysterically been depicted as Lego minifigures, right down to No Doubt's Adrian Young's mohawk. (Take my money, Lego.)

We also learn something about his wife, Helen, and his anguish over being a solo artist, an opportunity he spurned when it was his for the taking. Ultimately, we learn to understand his futuristic approach to fashion and music. “What I am is a maverick,” he says. No one will question him on that.

The 3D world the filmmakers have made is astonishing, with waves of clear Lego pieces washing up on a beach made of slats of Lego baseplates and Williams' collection of cool beats depicted as bouncing bricks with lights in them. There's Lego McDonald's nuggets, Lego pretzels, singing Lego fish and a Lego Anna Wintour, chilly and haughty in plastic, too.

Lego, while seemingly a restrictive medium — the hands are clips and everyone's walking is robotic since there are no Lego knees — can also, apparently, in the right hands soar, and here they do, with Williams in one gorgeous dream sequence watching the Earth's lights as a distant astronaut. It is when the filmmakers make Lego appear as water and music that are their crowning achievements.

Music credits are notoriously hard to pin down — Williams claims to have created McDonald's notoriously mysterious jingle “I'm lovin' it” — and the filmmakers try to cover any misinformation with a simple disclaimer in the end credits: “Not everything in this film is 100% accurate. For example, Pharrell never went to space.”

There are also some extraordinary moments that snap by but likely took months to make, like a Lego glimpse of the “I Have A Dream” speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial and protest footage from Black Lives Matter figurines shouting “Don’t shoot!”

The documentary lags a little during Williams' way up and rushes the years on top, although recreations of some of the music videos he fueled are too funny. Why he and Hugo broke up is papered over and the filmmakers struggle to find an ending, making several stutter steps.

“I think we're done,” are the last words we hear as the filmmakers finally give up. But they've left behind a trippy, sweet portrait of a genius, forever in building blocks.