SUPER/MAN: THE CHRISTOPHER REEVE STORY Review: Deeply Moving Portrait of the Actor Behind the Superhero

For Gen X’ers and Millennials, Superman in live-action form started and ended with Christopher Reeve.

Across four films and a decade (1978-1987), Reeve embodied Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Depression-era, comic-book creation, a secular savior, a super-powered alien from a doomed planet, an immigrant raised by kind-hearted adopted parents on a Kansas farm. As the Big Blue Boy Scout, Reeve represented “truth, justice, and the American way,” can-do optimism, never-surrender positivity, and American exceptionalism writ large.

Reeve, of course, was none of those things. What he represented to so many and who he was in the real world diverged the moment he stepped off a soundstage, slipped out of his red-and-blue tights, and changed into his street clothes, but for Reeve, it was a role he couldn’t escape or leave behind.

For a time, Superman turned Reeve into a movie star, one of the most famous men in the world (as with most movie stars, men wanted to be him, women wanted him), but audiences repeatedly failed to accept him in non-Superman roles. He was — then and now — simply Superman, the last son of Krypton, Kal-El his given name, Clark Kent his human name.

That was, of course, only part of Reeve’s story. In a tragic twist of fate sensitively outlined in Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s new documentary, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, Reeve suffered a devastating, life-changing fall in an equestrian competition on May 27th, 1995. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

While rehabilitation helped improve his quality of life, he never recovered the use of his extremities. With the aid of his wife, Dana, his three children, Matthew, Alexandra, and Will, along with several close friends, including onetime roommate Robin Williams, Reeve became a noted disability rights activist, initially focusing on a cure for spinal cord injuries (e.g., stem-cell research) and later, on care.

Far from reinventing the documentary format, Bonhôte and Ettedgui instead rely on traditional techniques and access to primary resources. They deftly interweave archival footage (e.g.,  interviews, film footage, audio recordings), home movies (most unseen until now), and present-day interviews with Reeve’s grown-up children, celebrity friends (Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon), and family friends.

Going back to their days studying at Juilliard in New York City, Reeve’s decades-long friendship with Williams receives significant screen time. Williams’s eulogy for Reeves proves to be especially moving. Each, in turn, and collectively, highlight the love, compassion, and effort needed to allow Reeve to live a meaningful life.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story delves into Reeve's background, his pre-stardom past (a fractured family, an accomplished, disapproving father) and post-stardom life (the two central romances of his life, his love of sports and the outdoors), albeit within the limits inherent in a standalone documentary. Bonhôte and Ettedgui connect his commitment phobia romance-wise to a troubled, emotionally fraught upbringing, but stop there, content with a reductive answer when a more complex, complicated answer might have presented Reeve in a slightly less flattering light.

Produced with the support of Reeve’s children, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story occasionally hints at the darkness and despair that Reeve must have faced after his life-altering accident, but otherwise retains a positive, even upbeat perspective, focusing primarily on Reeve’s disability rights advocacy over the last decade of his life. Here and there, Bonhôte and Ettedgui attempt to acknowledge the emotional toll involved in Reeve’s daily care, especially for his primary caretaker and wife, Dana, but rarely for too long. (Dana died from lung cancer only 18 months after her husband.)

Still, there’s little doubt that anyone who embraced Christopher Reeve as their Superman won’t be moved, sometimes even to tears, by Bonhôte and Ettedgui’s documentary: a flawed human being, struggling, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to make sense out of the accident that irrevocably changed his life, draw some meaning from the experience, and find a path forward. If anything, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story serves as a reminder of the inestimable value inherent in human connection regardless of stardom (or lack thereof) in navigating our mortality.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It will receive a limited theatrical release via Fathom Events in the United States on Saturday, September 21, and Wednesday, September 25. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes. A general release will follow in October via Warner Bros.