Tribeca 2025 Review: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN, A Compassionate Portrait of a Complex Man

There is no filmmaker quite like Andy Milligan. A connoisseur of the depraved and debaucherous, Milligan’s lot in life was troubled, but out of the pain he suffered beginning in his youth he managed to create a unique oeuvre that defies and defiles common decency at a level that is both shocking and admirable.

The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan, the latest documentary from directors Josh Johnson (Rewind This!) and Grayson Tyler Johnson (Bob Morgan's Just Going to Tell Some Stories) digs deep into Milligan’s life and work in a way that presents the grindhouse regular as a kind of avant garde auteur, and to be frank, it’s a hard argument to refute. The filmmakers dig deep into Milligan’s past with the help of scholars and contemporaries to try and piece together a picture of an artist who created because he had to, not simply out of opportunity. Art was the reason he woke up in the morning, and even when resources were thin, he’d not be kept from the act of creation.

An outwardly feminine young man, Milligan was shunned by a homophobic father and tortured by an overbearing mother from a very young age. He escaped to military service and from there to the world of acting in the newly bustling TV industry in the 1950’s. After finding a modicum of success, he decided to try his hand at writing and directing theater, creating an intimate community of off-kilter compatriots at Caffe Cino in New York’s West Village.

Caffe Cino played host to a number of up and comers in the years after owner Joe Cino opened the shop in 1958, but it was Milligan who seemed to have turned it into a happening. Among the first off-off Broadway mainstays in the ‘60s, Caffe Cino was also where a young, gay Milligan could be himself and connect with others who shared his passions and proclivities. From there, Andy made his way into the film industry as a reliable creator of product to feed the 42^nd Street grindhouse machine through the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and thus a legend was made.

Johnson and Johnson talk to many of Milligan’s friends and compatriots to help fill in the story of what, where, when, and who Andy Milligan was as a person and a director. His actors, writers, and other collaborators like actor Gerald Jaccuzo and writer/performer Hope Stansbury paint a sympathetic picture of a man consumed with a passion for cinema and realism. On the other hand, contemporary views from writers like Stephen Thrower (Nightmare U.S.A.) and Milligan biographer, Jimmy McDonough approach Milligan from a safer critical distance, although the past and present views of the man converge pretty frequently.

More than simply a compendium of Milligan’s work as a filmmaker, The Degenerate focuses on the instincts and impulses that fueled the man to create a staggering catalog of often incomprehensible, low budget trash. There are in-depth discussions of the way in which his sexuality and the associated rebellion influenced his writing and directing as well as the level of commitment that propelled him to take on multiple roles on a production – writer, director, clothier, production designer, cinematographer – in order to make sure that a project reached a finish line.

While the overview of Milligan’s filmography will undoubtedly be compelling to film fans with certain outré inclinations, it’s the human story that truly strikes a chord in The Degenerate. As the film follows Milligan’s story to its tragic, but not entirely unforeseeable end – he died broke and alone from AIDS related complications in 1991 – the interviews take on a more somber tone.

As exuberantly as his friends and collaborators spoke about his work and his passions, so do they sober up when discussing his sad final days. Both Jaccuzo and McDonough talk about their own struggles to come to terms with the inevitability of Milligan’s passing, especially at a time when AIDS was still a grand unknowable specter preying upon the gay community without mercy. It’s a gut-wrenching reminder that life is precious, and that the pain of loss doesn’t end when the suffering are gone from this earth.

A powerfully empathetic portrait of an artist sorely misunderstood in his own time and beyond, The Degenerate is an enlightening film that will undoubtedly encourage viewers to explore his bonkers career and perhaps consider it from a different angle.