Man and Superman

A Christopher Reeve documentary is probably one of the easiest filmic concepts to phone in. A charismatic, handsome actor, trained at the prestigious Juilliard, breaks big as Superman, one of the best-known fictional characters in Western media, and gives a performance so good that it inexorably ties him to the role. Then, years later, a freak accident renders him paralyzed forever. Refusing to give up hope, he spends the rest of his days a tireless advocate for disability research until his death, canonizing him forever as a Great American Hero—The Man of Steel made real. It’s a dream assignment, one that’s easy to coast on. You can hear the John Williams music and see the B-roll in your head as you read this, I bet.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story—which was so successful in its limited two-day release last month that it's back in theaters this weekend—is not that movie. Like a caped wonder flying off the comic page and onto the silver screen, its dexterous feat is to show an ordinary man made extraordinary through multiple circumstances beyond his control—and dare to pull him back to earth without sacrificing anything about what made him great.

I remember the accident well. Not Reeve's, mind you—I'm referring to a second cousin in Florida, granddaughter to my mom’s oldest brother. She was a few years younger than my brother, and not someone we saw a whole lot of. One day in the summer of 1999, we got a peculiar, horrible phone call: she didn’t fall off a trampoline, but fell on it the wrong way; within a week she'd been moved to a children’s hospital in Delaware, stabilized and ventilated. We stayed in a Ronald McDonald House and visited when we could, offering moral support and marveling as, somehow, the injuries proved non-threatening enough to let her walk again and even breathe without assistance.

In all the haze and horror of the situation, I remember a small moment: early on, she received a typed letter dictated by Reeve—a gesture I found rather touching. (The facility she recovered in shared some of the same medical personnel who took care of him after his accident.) By this point, he'd been paralyzed himself for four years, and was inarguably the public figurehead for spinal cord injury. It's hard to forget those piercing blue eyes and gleaming smile, as he sat for magazine photos in his chair, his wife Dana embracing him from behind. How, I wondered even as a child, could a man get (literally) knocked down by tragedy and have the (metaphorical) strength to get back up?

Perhaps there were clues in his most famous performance. I didn’t become a Superman fan until years later, well into my teens. As a child, the Gothic camp of Tim Burton's Batman films was my comic adaptation of choice. Then, as I got older, I discovered Superman: The Movie—marketed in its time as a star vehicle for Marlon Brando as Superman's Kryptonian father Jor-El, as well as Gene Hackman's scheming supervillain Lex Luthor.

But of course, you could not miss Reeve’s confident but easygoing portrayal of a being with limitless power and unyielding kindness. His easy candor on the terrace with Margot Kidder's Lois Lane—backed, of course, by a brilliant John Williams score, which by my teenage years was enough for me to watch anything—touched me deeply. "Lois, I never lie." Isn't that what we all want?

Based on the sheer number of subsequent Superman adaptations that trafficked in iconography of Reeve's rendition, it's safe to say yes. In one of his final screen roles, Reeve played a scientist who shared some of the secrets of Kal-El's homeworld of Krypton for a teenaged Clark Kent (Tom Welling) in the TV series Smallville; years later, Brandon Routh's performance in Superman Returns was meant to be a sequel to the first two Reeve films. Even a wordless, faceless cameo from the Man of Tomorrow in the DC flick Shazam utilized Williams' themes instead of Hans Zimmer's from the recent Man of Steel—and Reeve was ghoulishly, briefly resurrected via CGI for the crossover flop The Flash. There may be more Batman or Spider-Man films, but no superhero has been able to shake a performance more than Superman—a testament to what that strapping Juilliard grad was capable of even in tights.

I also remember where I was when I heard the news of Reeve's death. In high school, I'd take a morning chorus class, and so would get out of bed at 6 a.m. to be at the school for 7:15. Around 10 minutes before the hour, my alarm clock radio would play a news rundown from WPLJ; on October 10, 2004, I wanted nothing more than to purge the truth emanating from my alarm clock radio, turning the warmth of my bed cold and grey.

After his widow Dana succumbed to lung cancer less than 18 months later (despite not being a smoker), I was all in the tank for Superman as Reeve portrayed him. Reading about his ideals, before and after the accident; thinking about what he achieved for a class of people too regularly overlooked by society; seeing political cartoons of Superman reading the news of Reeve's passing and crying—it was all enough to turn on the waterworks for me. Hell, watching the preview for Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story—with its moving trailer rendition of Williams' "The Planet Krypton"—was enough to make me weep.

So it would be easy to dazzle me with hazy-focus stories of a good man who cared. The aw-shucks Northeastern-ness of it all. The zeal for life that led him to transform his body from "skinny WASP" physique during his Superman screen test to a broad but not 'roided out frame in the four films. The fiery love he had for his wife. The enduring friendship with Juilliard classmate Robin Williams, whose effortless, manic approach to performing enabled him to laugh again after his accident. Again: this is a lay-up, conceptually.

Instead, the people in the documentary—his children (including ABC news reporter Will Reeve, his only child with Dana), actors he was close with like Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg and Jeff Daniels, and various archival interviews with Reeve, Superman director Richard Donner and others—offer incredible empathy and nuance. Super/Man knowingly leaves the nuts and bolts of the Superman films' production for other, long-completed documentaries. Even his performances in other, non-caped material—stage play A Cure for Gravity, where he became close with co-star Katharine Hepburn; the sci-fi/romance Somewhere in Time; even a TV adaptation of Rear Window he directed and starred in after the accident—are spoken about in only the broadest of strokes.

So you are left with a portrait not of an artist, but a man—and one who, despite all evidence to the contrary, wasn't perfect. Reeve was clearly scarred by the divorce of his parents and the cruel tough love of his father, the academic F.D. Reeve, who rarely missed an opportunity to downplay his son's craft. (One haunting anecdote finds the elder Reeve finally proud of his boy for booking a meaningful role, only to realize he's mistaken Superman for Henrik Ibsen's Man and Superman.) As is so often the case with trauma, Reeve unwittingly made a few mistakes of his own in that realm. As glowing as the memories (and home movie footage) from Reeve's elder children Matthew and Alexandra are, his firstborn son confesses that he wasn't always as present as a child could want. And the recollections of their mother Gae Exton, with whom Reeve had a 10-year unmarried relationship, are tinged with all the bittersweet sadness of a woman who wished her partner would commit.

The film even takes a surprisingly nuanced look at his disability activism. As triumphant as his return to public life was after the accident—and as technically marvelous as his ability to regain slight movement and feeling in parts of his body through an intense exercise regimen—Super/Man doesn't shy away from the other side of the coin, getting briefly honest about how the presence of a celebrity, even one as cognizant of his privilege as he was, wasn’t always a welcome occurrence to some disability activists who'd lived with adversity for longer and with less doors held open for them. (I'd forgotten about the divisive response to a 2000 Super Bowl commercial for an investment firm that used rather ghoulish CGI to imagine Reeve cured of his paralysis and walking again.) Portraying Superman as human: what a concept—one that doesn't take away one iota of respect you'd have for him, coming or going.

Screenings of Super/Man happened to occur during a particularly strange moment in recent popular culture. Chappell Roan, a queer Midwestern pop star who's become blindingly famous this year, earned some of her first major and truly strange blowback as a public figure for comments she'd made that criticized the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris from the left (while still affirming she was going to vote for her). A lot of people lost their minds over a musician making honest, common-sense comments on a public servant that weren't entirely glowing, and reacted in such a way that Roan—who has openly discussed her bipolar II diagnosis and the challenges of her sudden tidal wave of attention this year—ended up cancelling several festival appearances.

Obviously, the political stances of a 26-year-old singer in 2024 are different from that of a fortysomething actor-turned-disability activist in the '90s and '00s. (So's the political landscape, too.) But in Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, I found a gentle way forward for the way we talk about celebrity. To paraphrase his own self-assessments in the documentary, Reeve was seen as great simply because he did good. He was not perfect. No one is, and I suspect our yearning for figureheads who are will only result in more disappointment for as long as celebrity culture is a thing in proper society.

Maybe, in our fame-addled world, we need more stories of good men more than that of great ones—ordinary people who became extraordinary. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is one such chronicle. You'll believe a man can fly, or even learn to walk again. And then, you'll believe we all can do the same, with enough work.