‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ shows actor in a vulnerable light

BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN The Washington Post

“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” opens with a reenactment of the moment when the film’s subject, the star of the “Back to the Future” film trilogy and the sitcoms “Family Ties” and “Spin City,” experienced the first symptom, while filming “Doc Hollywood” in 1990, of what would come to be diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease.

“I woke up with a ferocious hangover. I placed my left hand across the bridge of my nose to block the sunlight. A moth’s wing fluttered across my right cheek. I put my hand in front of my face so I could fingerflick the little beastie across the room. That’s when I noticed my pinkie: autoanimated. ... The trembling was a message from the future.”

The scene in the new, formally inventive and emotionally powerful documentary by Davis Guggenheim (“He Named Me Malala”) — based on several memoirs written by Fox, and liberally borrowing snippets of their text as narration — is shot using a combination of a body double for the then-29-year actor and clips from his films. It segues to a more recent