‘The trembling was a message’

• Published date: 16 May 2023
• Publication title: Signal

APPARENTLY, the credit goes to Michael Harte. It was the idea of the editor of Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, says the documentary’s director, Davis Guggenheim, to use scenes from the beloved actor’s TV shows and movies to tell the story of Fox’s increasingly complicated life

The choice helps make Still — streaming on Apple TV+ following its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival — a distinct viewing experience. Of course, were it not for the 61-year-old Fox — the one-time Family Ties and Back to the Future star who, at 29, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — being so open about the battle with the affliction, so vulnerable as he reflects on his journey, Still wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as it is.

Still begins with Parkinson’s, with the hungover morning in a Florida hotel room when Fox, in the middle of filming 1991’s Doc Hollywood, notices his pinky finger twitching.

‘‘The trembling was a message,’’ he says. ‘‘From the future.’’

Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman) soon takes us back, to Fox as a short child who found excitement after joining his school’s drama club and then getting cast on this and that. Then there’s the move to California to try his luck in Hollywood, where the hope is he’ll have an advantage: being able to pass for characters a few years younger than he actually was.

He scored some roles but missed out on big ones. (Fox says he was ‘‘close’’ to landing 1980’s Ordinary People but allows that director Robert Redford flossing his teeth during Fox’s audition wasn’t a great sign.)

As Still tells it, Fox was barely getting by, having sold the furniture from his studio apartment and getting what nutrients he could from packets of jam, when he won the part of ambitious, adult-like teen Alex P. Keaton on the sitcom Family Ties. It was a huge break and one that defied the odds considering one of its executive producers, Gary David Goldberg, wanted nothing to do with him at first despite others pushing him for the role.

Fox got a bunch of laughs in the audition — one of the many moments cleverly re-created in Still — and he was on his way to stardom.

The film covers the crazy life he managed as he juggled filming Family Ties and Steven Spielberg’s Future simultaneously.

The film’s easiest task: reminding us, in case we’d forgotten, of just how charming Fox can be regardless of whether he was working from a script. For example, we are treated to the moment in which, while accepting an Emmy Award in 1986, he...