Chasing Chasing Amy Takes Kevin Smith Personally

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.)