Adam Rifkin

(On Cable TV, April 2021) In keeping with Network Entertainment’s “I Am” series of documentary biopics, I Am Burt Reynolds ends up selecting a highly charismatic celebrity, although Burt Reynolds is slightly unusual in how he lived a full life and didn’t die prematurely, as most of the series’ subjects have. Still, the attraction here is Reynolds himself. A promising football player as a young man, he redirected his life to acting after a bad injury in the late 1950s and gradually became a superstar by the mid-1970s. This film doesn’t spend a lot of time on Reynold’s lengthy apprenticeship — it almost skips directly from post-college acting to 1972’s Deliverance, underplaying his fairly lengthy phase as a journeyman actor and occasional stuntman. But one thing that the film does capture in spades in Reynold’s extraordinary charisma, especially in talk-show appearances when he could be self-deprecating with the assurance of being an extraordinarily good-looking man. I am Burt Reynolds does feature dozens of snippets of Reynolds talking about himself, and nearly every single one of those is a funny one-liner. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Reynolds went directly from talk shows to stardom — his breakout role in Deliverance came on the heels of a casting based on his talk-show appearances, and so did his then-striking nude photoshoot for Cosmo magazine. The next ten years saw Reynolds at his best and biggest, culminating in the first two Smokey and the Bandits films. If the documentary serves one purpose, it’s to make contemporary audiences understand why Reynolds became such a sex symbol at that time—while contemporary standards have evolved and Reynolds may belong to a somewhat 1970s view of masculinity, you can understand through his appearances and footage why Reynolds was a hit—confident, funny, tough and clever at once. In keeping with other films in the series, this is a fundamentally sympathetic look at the character — his struggles with painkillers, money management and divorce are not underplayed, but there’s also far less darkness to Reynolds (who died at the ripe old age of 82) than with other subjects of the series. The glimpses at his life at the ranch reinforce that this is a documentary made by family and friends, as does the rather large place left for director Adam Rifkin to talk about Reynolds as the star of The Last Movie Star, which consciously aligned its character with the actor. The resulting documentary is a very decent homage to an often-underestimated actor and a grander-than-life personality. The lack of objectivity of the documentary is still in-keeping with the I am series, but there simply isn’t as much here to criticize in Reynolds himself.