Film
Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
A 1997 documentary about Bob Flanagan, a performance artist with cystic fibrosis who transformed his terminal diagnosis and chronic pain into provocative, darkly funny art. It's intimate and unflinching, equal parts love story, medical oddity and philosophical inquiry. For anyone willing to sit with discomfort, it's extraordinary.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you are drawn to documentaries that stay close to a single strange, uncomfortable life and let the subject's own performances and dark humour carry the weight.
Skip it if the explicit, confrontational material can feel like an endurance test rather than a portrait, and it is unrelenting if you want a conventional life story arc.
What it asks of you: Ninety minutes of close, unhurried attention: mostly direct interviews with the man and those around him, with long stretches where the camera holds still while uncomfortable things are said and shown.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
The Farewell2019
Explores how illness reshapes family dynamics and the gap between medical fact and how we live with it. Like Sick, it finds humour and tenderness in proximity to death without flinching from the weight of it.
But More conventionally plotted than Sick; the tonal balance between comedy and grief might feel calculated if you're used to documentary rawness.
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution2020
A documentary about disabled activists reclaiming their bodies and sexuality as acts of liberation and resistance. It shares Flanagan's belief that disability and pleasure aren't opposites, told with the same unapologetic joy.
But Focuses on political activism rather than individual experience; less intimate portraiture than Sick's one-person intensity.
The Act of Killing2012
A documentary that lets its subjects perform and narrate their own story, blurring confession with artifice. Both films trust the audience to hold contradictions and refuse easy moral positioning.
But Vastly different subject matter. The tonal ambiguity and length might feel exhausting rather than clarifying.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
127 Hours2010
Both are artists transforming bodily extremity into performance; both ask whether endurance is survival or art or both.
James Franco as a climber trapped by his own arm, filming himself to survive. It's a one-person performance art piece about the body as both prison and instrument of will—exactly Flanagan's project, but through fiction and adrenaline rather than chronic pain.
But Stylistically hyperactive and humanist in a way Sick never is; the survival angle can feel redemptive where Flanagan stays darker.
More like this (5)
Grey Gardens1976
An intimate portrait of two women in decay, both subjects and collaborators in their own mythmaking. It has Sick's unflinching eye and its fascination with how people live inside their own narratives.
But A very different era of documentary technique; the pacing is glacial by modern standards, which some find meditative and others find arduous.
Cameraperson2016
A documentary essay about bearing witness, made from footage the director shot over 25 years. Both films ask what it means to turn suffering into art and who gets to decide the meaning.
But Fragmented and abstract; it accumulates meaning rather than building toward a point, which can feel elliptical.
Bowling for Columbine2002
Michael Moore's most formally inventive and least didactic documentary. Like Sick, it refuses to simplify its subject and lets contradictions live in the frame without resolving them.
But Moore's presence can overshadow the story; the film's scale and rhetoric are nothing like the intimate one-man show of Flanagan's art.
Whose Streets?2017
Documents Ferguson through the eyes of activists and residents, centering their bodies and experiences as both subject and methodology. Shares Sick's belief that the personal and political are the same archive.
But Collage-like structure; some viewers find it formally challenging rather than clarifying.
Touching the Void2003
A survival story told through recreation and interviews, exploring how the body endures beyond what the mind thinks possible. It has Sick's fascination with the body as both limit and canvas.
But Adventure narrative that can feel more thrilling than philosophical; less concerned with the meaning-making Flanagan pursued.
People
Cast
- Bob FlanaganHimself
- Sheree RoseHerself
Kirby DickInterviewer- Kathe BurkhartInterviewer
- Rita ValenciaInterviewer
- Sarah DoucetteHerself
- Richard KopelleHimself
Directing
- Kirby DickDirector
Production
- Dody DornAssociate Producer
- Sheree RoseAssociate Producer
- Kirby DickProducer
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Silverlake Life: The View from Here, Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, Weed the People, NAZA, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed