Podcasting and stand-up comedian legend Marc Maron has been cemented within the cultural zeitgeist as a captivating curmudgeon. His on-stage persona continuously takes the form of an off-the-cuff lecture, in case your professor was susceptible to sitting on a stool and shouting in a sardonic mixture of self-deprecation and fist-shaking-at-the-sky liberalism. His persona behind the mic, in the meantime, for WTF (which now has over 1,600 episodes since its inception in September 2009) is that of a detailed good friend, interviewing his movie star visitors in a distinctly distinctive fashion of dialog with naked honesty, leaving his deepest and funniest demons out within the open.
In Are We Good?, longtime collaborator Steven Feinartz captures Maron in one more, sweeter gentle. Merely a number of months into the pandemic, Maron misplaced his companion, Lynn Shelton, the indie filmmaker who directed him in Sword of Belief and Netflix’s G.L.O.W. A mixed-media bio-doc, the movie concurrently paperwork Maron’s relationship to his personal grief alongside extra standard reportage of the comic’s path from his childhood in New Mexico to his faculty days in Boston and his heavy hand within the founding of the alt-comedy scenes in New York and Los Angeles.
Maron’s trademark nakedness is broadcast by means of direct interviews, the repurposing of his many Instagram stay movies, and snippets of his most viral conversations with the likes of former President Barack Obama, Robin Williams, Patton Oswalt, and his preliminary assembly with Shelton on the mic.
Marc Maron’s Interiority Is On Refreshingly Full Show
Feinartz, who concurrently directed Maron’s specials From Bleak to Darkish (2023) and Panicked (2025), fittingly casts his topic in the identical blistering vulnerability that has made his podcast so refreshing. John Mulaney, David Cross, W. Kamau Bell, and Caroline Rhea are among the many speaking heads who provide a posh mixture of acidic criticism and loving admiration of their good friend and colleague.
Notably, nevertheless, Feinartz doesn’t pass over cases through which Maron is seen in a particularly detrimental gentle. Maron jokes within the movie’s opening moments that this documentary will “break” him due to the opinions being provided therein, however in fact, the documentary finally ends up being a holistic portrait of one in all up to date comedy’s most beloved icons. It’s a becoming complementary piece to WTF.
The movie is, most of all, an aching tribute to the cosmic love shared by Maron and Shelton. “I cherished her, and he or she cherished me, and I knew that,“ Maron relays within the WTF episode the place he pronounces her passing, “I used to be higher in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.” What follows is a portrayal of Maron as a tough persona whose comedy journey was, at occasions, outlined by his predilection for cocaine and an off-the-cuff, perpetual burning of bridges. Actor Michaela Watkins presents that what made their relationship so particular was that Shelton cherished Maron’s “pugnaciousness,” whereas Maron made Shelton chortle more durable than she ever had.
All through the movie, Maron jokes with Feinartz behind the digital camera in consternation over the very thought of creating a documentary. He particularly jokes about sure drained tropes of the bio-doc format, asking if Feinartz can be animating anecdotes and WTF episodes, a hilarious and sly dig at lesser movies than this.
However Feinartz would not do this, opting as an alternative to show an audio line on a black display each time utilizing an episode from the podcast. It testifies to the filmmaker’s inherent understanding of radio’s skill to faucet into the unconscious. As a lot as Maron’s life has been on a stage or on display, it is inescapable that, for a lot of followers, he’s merely a voice, a voice that has transported audiences to superbly intimate and mental locations.
Are We Good? Is An Unusual Portrait Of The Artist’s Relationship To Grief
Are We Good? is a uncooked documentary about an artist who traffics primarily in rawness. Maron’s course of as a comic book is portrayed as distinctly messy and chaotic, but in addition savvy and distinct. WTF began earlier than podcasting was the ever-present artwork kind it’s at present, and primarily, in Maron’s phrases, as a strategy to reconcile with a number of the bridges he had burnt.
It is becoming, subsequently, that it’s the present that revitalized his as soon as fledgling profession, a mixture of his items of notion and anxiety-fueled confessions. So, too, has his profession after Shelton’s premature passing been reflective of a softer, heartbroken man who discovered his individual in his mid-50s just for her to be taken away. However the comedy has to proceed. “It is a fucking nightmare. There is not any one strategy to do it,” Maron says on stage about the precise strategy to deal with grief, “It is an ongoing nightmare.” However how can an artist cease making artwork?
“I am simply doing it as a result of that is what I do.” Lynn Shelton would do the identical.
- Launch Date
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March 7, 2025
- Runtime
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97 minutes
- Director
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Steven Feinartz
- Producers
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Sean Bradley, Rob Guillermo, Ethan Goldman, Ariel Weisbrod, Ryan Bitzer, Damion Greiman, Julie Seabaugh, Dan Baglio, Toby Nalbandian, Tim Rummel