I admit to a grimace of sick anticipation when I saw that one of this year’s Tribeca Festival movies would be Chasing Chasing Amy, a documentary about the 1997 Kevin Smith film Chasing Amy, acclaimed by 17-year-old me as the best movie of that year. I recognized the twofold embarrassment from watching Dear Mr. Watterson, an amateurish Calvin & Hobbes tribute: The secondhand embarrassment on behalf of the fannish filmmaker trying to turn their gushing about art into art itself, and firsthand embarrassment over how willing I was to witness that gushing out of sheer interest in the subject. There are countless documentaries I’ve never seen, yet I’ll subject myself to this glorified fanvid?
Chasing Chasing Amy is not as gruesome an act of self-glorifying fandom as Dear Mr. Watterson, which was memorably savaged in an episode of Documentary Now! Sav Rodgers, the filmmaker and star, is essentially elaborating on an eight-minute TED Talk video about “the rom-com that saved my life,” describing an obsession with Smith’s 1997 film, discovered years later by a lonely, bullied Ben Affleck obsessive who found it galvanizing and eye-opening (“to be fair, I didn’t know that there were other gay movies”). Rodgers later discovered that the movie was both controversial in its time, and considered potentially problematic today; after all, those aforementioned “other gay movies” weren’t necessarily made by straight men. Chasing Chasing Amy features a lot of aimless scenes out of any given fan-doc, where Rodgers visits various filming locations and marvels over nondescript swingsets and diners. Mostly, though, it uses interviews intertwined with the filmmaker’s personal story in an attempt to figure out whether the movie is clueless about its subject, surprisingly intersectional and insightful, or all of the above.
It’s a lucky break that the movie Rodgers becomes fixated on is by Kevin Smith; it’s hard to think of a more accessible big-name director. Between Smith’s enthusiastic participation and the online popularity of the initial TED Talk, the movie winds up with substantial face-time from writer-director Smith, stars Joey Lauren Adams and Jason Lee, and screenwriter Guinevere Turner, who had a small part in Chasing Amy, and a larger role behind the scenes. Smith, his producer Scott Mosier, and Turner all describe Mosier and Turner (who met at Sundance where Smith’s Clerks played alongside the Turner-penned Go Fish) developing a “romantic friendship” that couldn’t progress further because Turner is gay. After Mosier demurred on the idea of writing his own movie about this, Smith combined elements of that relationship with elements of his own romance with Joey Lauren Adams, and the attendant insecurities he felt during that time, into the screenplay for Chasing Amy.
So while the logline for Chasing Amy, and the source of its initial controversy, was that it follows a guy who falls in love with a lesbian and unexpectedly, eventually sees that romantic love returned, it’s really about comic-book artists Holden (Ben Affleck) and Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) navigating social expectations and psychological hang-ups (mostly Holden’s). A variety of critics and other filmmakers discuss these dimensions of the film, with a little more candidness than what you’d normally see on, say, a home video making-of feature. (Surprisingly, the film’s casting director is particularly skeptical.)
But that is, ultimately, what the best parts of Chasing Chasing Amy resemble: A bonus feature, featuring an unusually frank and context-heavy discussion of what the movie means to both its fans and its detractors. The material focused on Sav Rodgers is less successful. Anchored by the filmmaker’s coming out as a trans man about a third of the way through the film, Chasing Chasing Amy has an undeniably sweet and well-intentioned story to tell about its maker, but Rodgers comes across as a little self-fascinated in a familiarly youthful way, like he’s taking an extended selfie at a fan convention. Joey Lauren Adams, bless her, pushes back a little on the idea that this all begs to become its own movie, politely but firmly challenging Rodgers about why, exactly, she needs to spend any time thinking about his Chasing Amy obsession on-camera.
Rodgers leaves other edges of the filmmaking process visible – we see him calling cut, asking Smith if it’s OK to film something for “BTS material,” taking a minute after some emotional revelations – in a way that doesn’t add much to the material beyond running time. (It feels like a surefire way to pad the movie past 90 minutes, albeit just barely.) At one point, Rodgers has someone film him proposing marriage to his longtime girlfriend; they’re a cute couple (they met online as “nerdy teenagers who liked Glee”), but what does this really have to do with Chasing Amy, a movie that doesn’t seem as meaningful to her as it does to him?
The film does hit upon the way that Chasing Amy became accidentally prescient about the flexibility and fluidity of human sexuality – something that’s not, as it turns out, as simple as a gay-or-straight binary. But it never pushes those boundaries as forcefully as it could, and at times feels punishingly earnest. How, for example, in a movie that keeps emphasizing Chasing Amy’s limits as the work of a straight male, do the filmmakers bypass the opportunity to point out, even jokingly, how Sav’s trans identity (and subsequent identification as heterosexual) could explain his fixation on this work? (It’s something that almost any Kevin Smith character might pick up on: “Of course Chasing Amy spoke to you, man – you’re a straight guy!”) After an intense one-on-one conversation with Adams, where she reveals her reservations about the film (including the wounding relationship that inspired it and how Smith got a lot more closure from the movie than she did) and concludes that ultimately, it “wasn’t [her] truth,” Rodgers does reach a conclusion of sorts about the film. You may not be surprised to find out that it’s mainly a conclusion about himself.
Director: Sav Rodgers
Release Date: June 8, 2023 (Tribeca)
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.