Macdonald, though, didn’t use his looks in that way; they just kind of existed alongside the bratty edge of his comedy. And so when he was booted from “SNL,” he acted like he’d been kicked off a cliff. He was still out there in the culture, but he floundered around, and this, as the documentary captures, was related to his strange and slippery personality: his compulsive sincerity (which meant that he didn’t quite know how to package himself), his compulsive put-ons (which meant that he was actually scared to show who he was), his compulsive insecurity (which meant that he didn’t truly believe in himself as a star), mixed with an element of self-sabotage (his way of confirming all those anxieties about himself).
The movie is spanked along by clips of Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Conan O’Brien, and Dave Chappelle, and Apatow, working with the editor Jake Hostetter, assembles the clips in an entrancing way, so that we feel the underground sprawl of Macdonald’s career. He could be a great impressionist (his Bob Dole on “SNL” may have helped turn the 1996 presidential election; his Quentin Tarantino was inspired). He kept doing stand-up, but didn’t require the comedy stage to be great; just talking to Jane Fonda on his video podcast, “Norm Macdonald Live,” he was insanely funny. We see his appearance change quite a bit over the years, as he evolves into a puffier version of himself, something that happened in part because he spent his last nine years secretly fighting leukemia. (He died in 2021.) Yet the audience stayed with him — at least, more than the entertainment industry did.
