Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

Time moves in funny ways. Christopher Reeve has now been gone for longer than his time in the public eye and yet somehow his story makes for not just a sensible subject but the basis of one of the most compelling films of the 2024 fall movie season.

Reeve is the focus of Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, a cleverly-titled and well-made documentary that reflects on the highs and lows of the actor’s career and personal life.

Reeve, of course, is best known for playing Superman in four Warner Bros. movies from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first Superman, released right before Christmas 1978, remains a landmark in big-budget filmmaking, the first truly successful attempt to bring a comic book superhero to the big screen in modern feature film format. Superman gave way to Tim Burton’s Batman, which later gave way to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, whose reign of three films paved the way for Marvel to unleash the golden age of superhero movies with its unprecedented cinematic universe whose grip on the public’s hearts and wallets has only begun to loosen in recent years.

Despite the comic book movie’s prevalence and prosperity in modern pop culture, not many have traced the lineage back to the ’70s. Super/Man isn’t interested in doing that, either, instead preferring to remember the man who late-20th century moviegoers believed could fly.

Reeve’s time in the red cape and blue tights is detailed here, but despite counting DC Studios as a production company and Warner Bros. as a global distributor, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui (whose past documentary credits include the acclaimed 2015’s Listen to Me Marlon and 2018’s McQueen) are not primarily motivated to make you discover or revisit that quartet of films. In fact, Super/Man acknowledges that at least two of the sequels are categorically bad and implies that Reeve should be known for more than the franchise.

And yet, Reeve’s success outside of Metropolis was extremely limited, another thing this documentary concedes as it surveys his career without slavish devotion to chronology. Reeve found more fulfilment as a father to three children who are all interviewed at length in the present day.

The challenges that Reeve faced after a 1995 equestrian accident left him paralyzed from the neck down are not just addressed, but documented here. Super/Man makes use of a surprising amount of old family videos, which show Reeve to be a revered father and husband, a determined fighter, and a champion of the people, using his unique platform and predicament to raise awareness and support.

Bonhôte and Ettedgui avoid hagiography, which is no easy feat here. The documentarians touch on such subjects as tensions in the Reeve family and the abrupt end to Reeve’s longtime partnership with Gae Exton, the mother of his first two children. One of the most striking anecdotes shared finds Reeve’s father ordering champagne to celebrate his son getting cast as Superman under the mistaken impression that he was cast in the George Bernard Shaw play Man and Superman.

The filmmakers fit all they can into the reasonable 104-minute runtime, reflecting on Reeve’s close and enduring friendship with Robin Williams, who along with his then-wife Marsha threw the Reeves family a party every year on the anniversary of Christopher’s accident. We get some insight into Reeve from a trio of famous friends and collaborators in Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jeff Daniels, whose memories of Reeve landing the Superman role while doing an off-Broadway play with him and William Hurt are a delight. Expectedly, considerable time is spent covering the work of Christopher and his wife/widow Dana raising research funds for the paralyzed and disabled, communities historically marginalized both in and outside Hollywood.

Assuming physical media does not disappear, Super/Man will one day make a really good bonus feature on some Superman box set. If you want to see it before then, and you should, you’ll be interested to know that the film will be playing in North American theaters for one day only this Saturday courtesy of Fathom Events.