Film
Gleason
Gleason is a portrait of former NFL player Steve Gleason confronting ALS diagnosis at 34, expecting his first child. It's intimate and unsentimental, tracking how he rebuilds his life through technology, advocacy, and stubborn love. For anyone grappling with mortality, disability, or what it means to stay present when the future narrows.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you want a personal documentary built from a man's own video diary, where tenderness and hard truths share the frame and the filmmaking stays close to the people in it.
Skip it if you need fast plot or a clear outside story, since this is emotionally heavy and follows a life rather than a tight arc.
What it asks of you: Close to two hours, unhurried and intimate, with long stretches of home video and quiet talk; patience builds slowly into its emotional weight.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown1989
Daniel Day-Lewis inhabits Christy Brown, an Irish painter with cerebral palsy, with such ferocity that you forget you're watching performance. It's about art, stubbornness, and the body refusing to be its own prison.
But It's set in grinding poverty in 1950s Dublin, and the emotional weight can feel relentless. Some viewers find the suffering itself becomes the point.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly2007
Julian Schnabel's visual masterpiece about a man locked in by complete paralysis, communicating through blinks. It's luminous, inventive, and finds joy and eroticism in the interior life—not despite the body's prison, but within it.
But It's a film about near-total immobility, which means long, static scenes. The French pacing won't suit everyone's attention span.
Still Alice2014
Julianne Moore gives a performance of surgical precision as a Columbia linguist losing her language to early-onset Alzheimer's. It's about identity, legacy, and the people who love you when you can't remember them.
But The decline is relentless and the ending offers no comfort. If you need hope, this film will frustrate you.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Gleason
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Synecdoche, New York2008
Both Gleason and Synecdoche are obsessed with the act of documentation itself—the camera rolling, the record being kept—as a way of insisting on presence and meaning in the face of dissolution. Both ask whether capturing life is the same as living it.
Charlie Kaufman's baroque, impossible film about a theater director whose life and art collapse into each other, leaving him unable to tell the difference between document and invention. It's about legacy, the work of staying alive, and how you perform yourself for people who love you.
But It's pretentious, overlong, and genuinely difficult to watch. The narrative dissolves into abstraction and some viewers feel Kaufman is more interested in his own cleverness than in the people on screen.
More like this (4)
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution2020
This documentary finds its power in disability activism and kinship, not tragedy. It's joyful, angry, and shows how people build lives of dignity and pleasure on their own terms. Energizing rather than draining.
But The first half moves slowly through summer camp nostalgia before the film finds its argument. Some will lose patience before the payoff arrives.
Of Time and the City2008
Terence Davies's meditation on Liverpool, memory, and time. It's formal, poetic, shot largely from archive footage, and moves through mortality with the gentleness of someone making peace.
But It's not a story. It's a mood, an essay, a reverie. If you need plot or conventional structure, this will feel like waiting for a train that never arrives.
Murderball2005
Wheelchair rugby athletes preparing for the Paralympics. It's energetic, competitive, and let athletes define themselves—funny, sexual, ambitious, ordinary—rather than tragic. You stop noticing the wheelchair very quickly.
But It's about sports, which some find inherently dull. And it can veer into inspiration porn despite its best efforts not to.
The Truffle Hunters2020
An elegantly shot documentary about aging men in rural Italy hunting truffles with their dogs. It's quiet, tactile, and interested in craft, ritual, and the bonds between people and animals as time shortens.
But Nothing happens. It's a mood piece about old men and dirt. If you need momentum or meaning spelled out, you'll find it gentle to the point of nothing.
People
Cast
- Steve GleasonSelf
- Michel GleasonSelf
- Rivers GleasonSelf
- Paul VariscoSelf
- Blair CaseySelf
- Scott FujitaSelf
Drew BreesSelf
Eddie VedderSelf
Mike McCreadySelf- Vinnie VariscoSelf
- Mike GleasonSelf
- Gail GleasonSelf
Directing
- J. Clay TweelDirector
Writing
- J. Clay TweelWriter
Production
- Kevin LakeProducer
- Kimi CulpProducer
- Scott FujitaProducer
- Seth GordonProducer
Recommended by
Me Before You, Life Itself, The Genius of Marian, The Pride of the Yankees, State of Play: Trophy Kids, Art and Craft, Black Sun, Man vs. Snake, Jelly Roll: Save Me