Comedic Documentary Turns Cancer Into a Silly Joke

André Ricciardi battles Stage IV colorectal cancer with the same level of seriousness that a class clown prepares for a history test. He doesn’t really sweat the results, and refuses to see it as all that separate from the rest of his daily life. Even the intake of medication never really registers for him as a hard-and-fast rule, but rather a strong suggestion. Sometimes he doesn’t want to take potassium pills, so he doesn’t. Simple as that. Though he never seems to skip hitting the bong.

André is an Idiot is a decidedly different look at the dying process than last year’s portrait of the poet Andrea Gibson, Come See Me in the Good Light. Gibson saw death as a way for them to slow down and relish in the quotidian; Ricciardi laughs at its conclusiveness. Both could be said to have looked for some inherent meaning in the mundanity of mortality, though their routes towards understanding so are radically different.

André is an Idiot is Refreshingly Honest, If Not All That Unique

Tony Benna’s directorial debut is sweet and life-affirming, as it is meant to be. An ad executive with a rebellious streak, Ricciardi is an active participant in the portraiture of his own demise. There’s a refreshing outlook on cancer here that is decidedly unsensational, depicting as it does the waiting around that often accompanies long periods of testing. Every life is a universe unto itself, and Ricciardi was clearly the kind of unique soul whose spirit enriched everyone around him, but its actually in the margins of this sometimes preening doc that Benna’s film really hits its target. When the film rests, it destigmatizes a process that everyone will eventually go through (albeit in a range of ways).

Being that the film is positioned as a quirky take on an unconventional character, however, André is an Idiot isn’t always able to stake its purpose. Weird though it is that Ricciardi was the type of person whose eccentricity caused him to purchase Kim Kardashian’s pleather pants in the hopes of cloning her, he is also… pretty normal. He’s a Tesla-driving marketing executive in San Francisco. He’s been married his entire life and has two daughters. That doesn’t exactly scream lifelong rebel.

That isn’t to say that Ricciardi isn’t an exceptionally charming person to listen to for 87 minutes. His life may never have radically bent the expectations of an American suburban life, but he certainly has some stories worth telling. André is an idiot is as much about Ricciardi’s attitude towards his diagnosis as it is a loving documentation of a caretaker in action, and his wife, Janice, is just as captivating. Their love story — borne out of a spontaneous decision to get her a green card which took them to The Newlywed Game — is delightfully strange and awfully romantic.

André is in fact not an idiot but a wildly smart person whose “stupidity” is more about the ways in which he skirts the laws of normal adulthood. His very cancer should have been preventable had he not so flatly refused to get a colonoscopy at the normal age for men (at around 45 years old). Most of the proof of his idiocy is from his younger years, as in a story of “furious masturbation” as a child which opens the film and which will have your skin crawl.

The film bounds by with alacrity. It has Ricciardi’s energy, but not necessarily the irreverent spirit that he and his loved ones so espouse. For the most part, André is an Idiot operates like most documentaries of its kind do: with talking-head interviews, fly-on-the-wall observations and a soupçon of clay-mation reminiscent of Celebrity Death Match. It’s a likable film, but what revelations it offers about Ricciardi’s experiences feels pretty tame.

However, tame isn’t necessarily off the mark, either. “We have to face it,” Ricciardi tells Janice after a particularly hard doctor’s visit. And one way you visit it is by talking about death. André is certainly an extremist in this regard. He made an entire documentary about it, and in so doing gives his kids and his wife the gift of grieving. And also the gift of the film itself, which means anytime they want to be reminded of André’s so-called idiocy, they can flip this one on and then flip him off. If you know, you know.

André is an Idiot opens in theaters on March 6th, 2026.