I Am Sam Kinison (2017)

I Am Sam Kinison (2017): written by Adrian Buitenhuis and John Barbisan; directed by Adrian Buitenhuis: Sam Kinison became America's most popular stand-up comic in the late 1980's, eventually selling out stadiums and living like a rock star. This documentary, part of the 'I Am' series that also includes I Am Chris Farley, shares certain problems with the other I Am features -- a tendency towards hagiography, over-statement, and avoidance of certain negative features of the subject. 

Kinison, startling and innovative in his screaming stage presence, looks pretty familiar now: he's the aggrieved heterosexual white man, enraged by women and gays. There's a reason Kinison became so popular for a short time -- much of his act seems like a blueprint for today's Republican Party. Only way more public about the rampant drug and alcohol use. 

He's definitely an important and influential figure. But the various defenses of some of his now nigh-unwatchable rants ("Everything's OK if it's funny!") misses the basic fact that Kinison spent a lot of his vitriol punching down at people and groups who had far less power in the world of 1989 than heterosexual white men. That is to say, gays, women, starving Africans... the list could go on. 

That Kinison died in 1992 clean and sober (so far as we know) crashing into a car driven by a drunk seems almost impossibly ironic. A fascinating but immensely flawed documentary, much like the man and the comic. Lightly recommended.