Film

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

This is the strange, slightly haunted document of what happens when a comedian agrees to become another comedian for a year and never quite comes all the way back. Built from footage the studio shelved for nearly two decades, it's part making-of, part confession, and genuinely unsure whether Jim Carrey found himself in Andy Kaufman or lost him there.

TMDb rating7.5

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Man on the Moon1999

The film Carrey disappeared into — watch it after Jim & Andy and every scene plays differently once you know what the cameras weren't showing at the time.

But Forman's biopic tells it fairly straight; if you wanted the chaos and the doubt, the documentary already gave you the interesting part.

Man on the Moon poster

The Truman Show1998

Carrey's other great performance about a man whose reality is engineered by someone else — funnier, sadder, and oddly prophetic once you've watched him actually lose the plot for real on a film set.

But It's a tidy satire with a clean ending, nowhere near as raw or unresolved as watching an actual breakdown unfold on camera.

The Truman Show poster

Listen to Me Marlon2015

Brando's own hypnosis tapes, assembled into a ghostly self-portrait — another towering actor talking himself apart, decades before Carrey did something similar in front of a crew.

But Slower and much more melancholic, with none of the Danny DeVito wisecracks that keep Jim & Andy from tipping into despair.

Listen to Me Marlon poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Beyond the Mat1999

Kaufman built his entire fame on pro wrestling kayfabe, the deliberate blur between real and staged, and this documentary walks straight into that same fog with actual wrestlers who genuinely can't find the edge of the character anymore.

Goes backstage with pro wrestlers who've fused with their gimmicks the exact way Carrey fused with Kaufman — trashier subject, identical wound underneath the spandex.

But It's grubby, sad, and unglamorous where Jim & Andy is Hollywood-shiny — not everyone wants their existential crisis delivered ringside.

Beyond the Mat poster
More like this (8)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest1975

Milos Forman directing another performer whose grip on identity is the entire film — Nicholson's McMurphy feels like a distant cousin of the persona Carrey chased under the same director years later.

But It's a heavier, angrier film with no backstage comedy to soften it — a gut-punch, not a curiosity.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest poster

Kate Plays Christine2016no page yet

An actress preparing to play a real woman who died on live television, in a film that can't decide if it's documentary or descent — exactly the vertigo Jim & Andy trades in.

But Deliberately uncomfortable and inconclusive; it refuses you the catharsis a normal behind-the-scenes doc would provide.

Amadeus1984

Forman again, turning genius into something close to demonic possession — Salieri watching Mozart the way we watch Carrey watching Kaufman quietly take over.

But Costume drama, opera, and a much longer, stagier runtime — a big ask if you came for backstage weirdness.

Amadeus poster

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind2018

Another documentary about a comic genius whose need to perform never switched off, told with real warmth and real grief sitting just under the highlight reel.

But A more conventional talking-heads structure — it never takes the formal risk of just handing you the raw, unedited footage.

Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind poster

Val2021

Val Kilmer's own decades of self-shot archive, turned into a document of an actor watching his younger, hungrier self from a great and painful distance.

But It's about illness and mortality as much as performance — a far sadder register than Jim & Andy's mischief and warmth.

Val poster

Overnight2003no page yet

A cautionary tale about a man who believed his own hype until it consumed him — the flip side of Carrey's story, minus the talent to back it up.

But There's no affection here, just a slow-motion car crash — bleaker and far less generous to its subject.

Perfect Blue1998

It's the animated, genre-cranked version of the exact fear Jim & Andy circles — a performer's identity getting overwritten by a role — staged here as a full horror movie instead of a making-of.

An idol-turned-actress starts losing the line between her real self and her character in Satoshi Kon's hallucinatory anime — the same identity dissolution, played as psychological horror instead of comedy with a shadow.

But It's fiction, it's violent, and it's genuinely disturbing in ways the documentary, for all its weirdness, never tries to be.

Perfect Blue poster

A Double Life1947no page yet

Decades before Carrey, this noir had the premise cold: an actor playing a role starts becoming him off-stage, jealousy and all — the same terror Jim & Andy documents, just seventy years earlier and in black and white.

Ronald Colman won an Oscar playing an actor who can't shake Othello once the curtain falls — the method-acting-as-possession idea Jim & Andy explores, dramatized decades earlier as a proper noir thriller.

But Its pacing and melodrama are very much of 1947; without patience for stately, stagey filmmaking it'll feel stiff.

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