An uneven chronicle of grief, Steven Feinartz's Are We Good? follows comedian and podcast host Marc Maron during and after the isolation of COVID lockdown, during which he lost his partner, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton. It's a documentary of immense detail and a vast number of opinions on Maron's personality, and how he deals with loss through stand-up comedy. However, this context pales in comparison to his actual art and artistic process — the brief glimpses of which are more enticing than the film surrounding it.
The movie feels, at times, like having a lengthy stand-up routine interrupted in order to explain its origins. For a comic like Maron, whose work is filled with expository, self-reflexive piss and vinegar, this doubling down often proves extraneous. Essentially, Are We Good? doesn't give you that much more than Maron's recent specials.
What is Are We Good? about?
At its core, the film is about Shelton, and eventually, her absence. The hole she leaves in Maron's life is central to his story, and in that vein, Feinartz creates an adequately radiant portrait of the late indie darling.
The strengths of Are We Good? lie in its edit, courtesy of Derek Boonstra, Natalie Ancona, and Jenn Harper. Through old Instagram Live broadcasts from Maron's account, an intimate lockdown portrait emerges of the comic's life before and immediately after Shelton's passing, affording him the opportunity to essentially hold his own camera and tell his own story. However, outside of this specific setup, Are We Good? tends to lie in wait, practically meandering through rote documentarian traditions until it decides to toss in a few clips of Maron on stage.
This spotlight is where Maron is most comfortable, unfiltered, and vulnerable — it's where he's most himself — but there isn't nearly enough of it in the movie. While it can be fun to have other comics opine on his persona, from John Mulaney to David Cross, their observations seldom offer anything new. This is no fault of theirs, mind you. Rather, it's an outcome of Maron's casual delivery and his tendency to self-deprecate, which conveys the same information in its most raw and potent form. If anything, this is the wrong kind of movie for his skill set and style of comedy.
Are We Good? isn’t a good fit for Marc Maron
There are several moments during the production, as Feinartz follows Maron around his home with a camera, during which the comic seems annoyed. This is, of course, part of his idiosyncratic charm and part of what drew Shelton to him in the first place. However, one gets the sense that the filmmakers ought to have taken Maron’s lucid criticisms to heart.
There are moments when, seemingly as a joke for the audience (or perhaps a ploy to playfully annoy Maron), the documentary employs a specific flourish soon before or after the comedian decries it. For instance, the use of an animated photo montage, one of several "gimmicks" Maron critiques as an unnecessary substitute for Feinartz’s sheer glut of up-close-and-personal-footage.
Getting the cranky side of Maron is fun and honest, but this approach also hangs a lampshade on some of the movie's biggest flaws. As the partner of a former director, as an actor himself, and as the long-time host of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron (which has had numerous high-profile guests from both sides of the camera), Maron clearly knows a thing or two about movies. It's hard to avoid the sense that he's right about these numerous flourishes feeling like unnecessary distractions.
It would be one thing if Are We Good? then adjusted to his whims, but that it treats his jabs as mere complaints results in the movie feeling at odds with its subject.
Are We Good? takes a distant approach
A lot of the movie contains archival images and video of Maron, but it uses these to explain various highlights (and low points) across his life much like a Wikipedia article might. For the most part, it only captures Maron as he wants to be seen. It isn't a film of inquiry so much as simply observation.
It would be different if Are We Good? were treating Maron as some kind of unknowable enigma but it's very much an overarching biographical portrait, given the breadth of its old footage. And yet, its approach remains fundamentally at odds with his own: one of opening the darkest, angriest parts of himself to his audience through frank conversation.
As a movie, it's too withdrawn and tepid, relying too heavily on that which Maron provides. Its lens looks, but doesn't see, and it certainly doesn't seek to probe past its subject's annoyance to capture what lies beneath it. Feinartz seems respectful of Maron's loss, but perhaps Are We Good? is too respectful for a comedian who trades in surprising his audience by pushing unexpected emotional buttons.
In fact, the film is arguably at its strongest when pulling from some particularly vulnerable episodes of WTF — his Shelton in-memoriam, or his discussions on loss with Andrew Garfield and Patton Oswalt — during which it accompanies the audio clips with visual waveforms. These white, musical squiggles on a black background take on an almost spiritual form in the process, becoming jagged, unnerving externalizations of grief. But again, even these soundbites are entirely on Maron's terms.
There's perhaps a more confrontational version of Are We Good? — either on some cutting room floor or simply in the imagination — which further pushes Maron into his signature paradoxical zone, where he's most at ease bleeding for his art. Then again, one could just as easily argue that this version would entail Maron's stand-up specials in full. So, it's hard not to wonder if viewers would be better off watching those instead, rather than being enticed by clips from them, before having them constantly yanked away.
Death of a Unicorn was reviewed out of its premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival.
