Partway through “Chasing Chasing Amy,” Sav Rodgers, a first-time feature director and a mega fan of the 1997 movie he’s exploring, sits to interview the film’s star, Joey Lauren Adams. He begins to discuss the role when Adams cuts in.
“Are you looking to me for something that I can’t give you?” she asks Rodgers. “I don’t know what it is you want from me.”
The moment marks a turning point in Rodgers’s agreeable documentary, which sets out to provide a contemporary lens on “Chasing Amy.” It opens with the director sharing that he once used the story as a queer field guide and a source of comfort amid adolescent struggles. He then calls on writers and thinkers to unpack the movie’s themes and fraught position in the queer canon.
But it is not until his interview with Adams that Rodgers touches on the most urgent questions of his cinematic survey. What do filmmakers owe their fans? Who can lay claim to a movie? And who defines its legacy?
Adams goes on to share painful memories from that era, including leering Hollywood men — Harvey Weinstein was the producer — and jealous barbs from the “Chasing Amy” director Kevin Smith, her boyfriend at the time.
Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution. It’s a convenient ending, but one senses that Rodgers can’t see that, in his overview of the movie’s cultural impact, some perspectives are more instructive than others.
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