Sundance’s First Breakout Hit Is This Doc About an Idiot’s Death

PARK CITY, Utah—André Ricciardi would be the breakout star of this year’s Sundance Film Festival if he were alive. Yet as indicated by the title of Tony Benna’s documentary, André is an idiot.

André is an Idiot makes clear, however, that he was also a freewheeling, eccentric one-of-a-kind whose humor and heart brightened the lives of all who knew him, even in the face of his own mortality. A cautionary tale about short-sighted recklessness that morphs into a stirring tribute to an idiosyncratic firecracker who had the courage to stare down death while remaining doggedly, hilariously true to himself—and to the camera—to the very end, this winning non-fiction portrait proves equally adept at eliciting laughs and tears.

As he admits at outset, André is an idiot because he didn’t get a colonoscopy before the doctor-recommended age of 50. Consequently, when he finally did undergo the routine preventative procedure, his physicians discovered an enormous mass that further tests confirmed was stage-four cancer that had metastasized to other parts of his body. This was an enormous surprise to André, who explains in a hilarious opening monologue that failing to have a colonoscopy in a timely manner is the only mistake he ever made that was bigger than the time his teenage self opted to masturbate against the wooden bottom of his grandparents’ Formica bathroom counter and, for his weirdo impulses, got a head full of splinters.

With giant white hair that looks like he recently had his finger in an electric socket, and a matching beard that’s darkest at the mustache, 52-year-old André sits and talks about his life, his condition, and his efforts to cope with his impending demise in André is an Idiot, as do his friends, colleagues, and relatives.

At least as far as this doc goes, his story begins in 1995 San Francisco, when he impulsively agreed to marry bartender Janice so she could stay in the country once her student visa expired. This was a union of convenience. However, because Janice was so paranoid that the authorities would come knocking, they worked hard to get to know each other, going so far as to test their familiarity by appearing on a modern update of The Newlywed Game. When they won, they earned a Caribbean vacation that led to actual love. Decades later, they’re now the happy and proud parents of two teen daughters, Tallula and Delilah.

André’s brother Nick, best friend Lee, and ad-agency bosses Tommy Means and Jason Harris all praise André for being a unique character with a crazy thirst for knowledge and an inventive, balls-to-the-wall spirit, and André is an Idiot captures it all, not simply through interviews but via rapid-fire archival footage montages and stop-motion sequences attuned to his gonzo wit.

In the initial months after his diagnosis, André’s goofiness continues to be in fine form, even when he’s discussing his grim fate, such as when he confesses that once you’re diagnosed with cancer, you want to know that you spent your time on Earth becoming an expert in one thing—and the fact that he chose advertising makes him think, “What a waste of a life!” In Benna’s film, he comes across as a man of irrepressible enthusiasm and self-deprecating ridiculousness, imagining his falling-out tufts of hair as googly-eyed creatures and relaying a plan to surprise his radiation technician by placing an “I Voted” sticker on his anus.

André refuses to devolve into desolation in André is an Idiot, both because he doesn’t want to upset his loved ones and because he views this film as a beneficial means of coping with his anxiety.

At the same time, though, he argues that the most valuable and beautiful portraits are the ones that reveal our weaknesses and flaws, since they tell the complete story. To put his money where his mouth is, André speaks at length about his past drug use—he lists acid, mushrooms, coke, heroin, and meth as former indulgences, “but nothing more serious than that”—and about how decades of hangovers prepared him for the miseries of chemotherapy. Furthermore, he routinely bares his torso to underline the toll the disease is taking on him, all as he attempts, in his alternately voluble and guarded way, to express his thoughts about pain, fear, and grief.

From meeting a man who runs a website about “death yells” so he can engage in some last-word primal screams, to taking a trip to the middle of the desert with Lee (where he experiences true silence), to visiting a salon so he can have his eyebrows trimmed (his medication causes them to grow to unnatural lengths), André makes sure to always be André in André is an Idiot.

Still, the more his health worsens, the more difficult that becomes, and in its later passages, the film allows him and Janice to voice their complex (and often irreconcilable) feelings about how best to deal with death. On a phone call with his therapist, André opines that these late stages should be the funniest—because he’s now a genuine mess—and yet they’re not, and his struggle to keep finding the absurd in the tragic is the material’s most poignant climactic thread.

Whether he’s meeting with his work colleagues to brainstorm a colonoscopy PSA or having Tommy Chong play his intensely private dad in faux-father-son scenes, André is a study in bravery. He’s frustrated that his tale is slowly turning into the sort of mawkish 1990s-era drama that he despises, and he’s determined to stay as close to the same as his circumstances will allow—as when he phones up a cryogenics lab to inquire about preserving his head and body (they’ll merely do the latter) or tells his brother that he’d like his corpse to be donated to television (for use as a cadaver on a TV show?). Part hippie clown, part New Age philosopher, he fights his destiny with the same silliness that defined his life.

In a fashion reminiscent of Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson is Dead, André is an Idiot confronts our impermanence, warts and all, through a novel and quirky lens that’s wide enough to include everyone affected by its subject’s passing. The André lionized by Benna is clever, compassionate, weird, and wild, and if he’s an idiot, he’s nonetheless a smart one, at least insofar as his cinematic last will and testament illustrates the value of cherishing all you have—a process that includes getting a regularly scheduled colonoscopy.