90 min | R | December 2, 2022 | Netflix
Robert Downey Jr. turns a camera on his father, the underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., and films him in his final months. Sr. promptly hijacks the project to cut his own version. The son wanted a tribute. The father wanted the last word.
“Sr.” follows Robert Downey Jr. as he documents his father, the anarchic underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., near the end of his life. Downey Sr. refuses to sit still for a conventional portrait. He grabs his own camera and starts assembling a parallel cut of the same footage. The film becomes a negotiation between two filmmakers who happen to be father and son. What it is really about is control. Downey Sr. spent a career mocking authority, and he has no intention of surrendering authorship of his own death.
Downey Sr. plays himself as a man still chasing the next gag while his body fails him. He stages absurd shots around New York and narrates them with the dry mischief that defined his work. Downey Jr. appears as the son trying to extract feeling from a father allergic to sentiment. The two circle the things they never said, and Downey Jr. lets the discomfort sit on camera rather than resolving it. Sean Hayes and Alan Arkin turn up as themselves to testify to Downey Sr.’s influence, and Norman Lear frames him as a genuine original. The supporting voices exist to confirm what the son already knows and the father will not admit.
Chris Smith directs and shoots the film in black and white, a choice that deliberately mirrors Downey Sr.’s own underground aesthetic. The grayscale flattens the present-day footage into the same texture as the archival clips, so the line between past and present dissolves. Smith embeds Downey Sr.’s competing edit inside the documentary, letting the older man’s cuts interrupt the younger filmmakers’ framing. The editing turns the structure into an argument about whose movie this is. Smith keeps himself visible as the third filmmaker in the room, which makes the negotiation over the final cut the real subject.
“Sr.” works because it refuses to clean up the relationship it documents. Downey Sr. dodges every invitation to be tender, and the film respects the dodge instead of forcing a reconciliation. The grief arrives sideways, in a shared joke or a held silence, never in a speech. Smith builds a portrait of a man through the way that man insists on making his own portrait. The result honors Downey Sr. by letting him stay difficult to the end.