“Art is hard.” That’s the underlying thesis of most documentaries about making movies. The truism is present throughout My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, a one-hour documentary shot by Refn’s wife, Liv Corfixen, while he was making Only God Forgives. Refn seems perpetually distraught as he’s writing and directing his follow-up to Drive. He spends multiple scenes in his lavish 42nd-floor Bangkok hotel room sulking on the couch, depressed in bed, or pensively looking out the window at the world below. What’s on screen is just a snippet of the woe. Cofixen complains behind the camera that Refn doesn’t allow her to film when a major crisis occurs.

There seem to be two other threads running through the documentary that are intertwined with the idea that art is hard: “success is damning” and “failure is inevitable.” My Life Directed by Nicolas Windin Refn is about how artists interpret failure and the sense that they’re failing. How fascinating you find the film depends on how closely you follow Refn’s work and your patience for the banal.

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My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Director: Liv Corfixen
Rating: PG-13
Release Date: February 27, 2015

My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn is only kind-of about the making of Only God Forgives. The primary focus is Refn’s artistic struggle in mundane settings—hotel rooms, cabs, before screenings—rather than on set. The film opens with Refn so anxious about making a new movie that he asks his hero and friend, legendary cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorwosky, to do a tarot card reading for him. Maybe the narrative symbolism of the cards will ease Refn’s superstitious mind. Candor thrives in these unassuming places. Refn’s no longer forced to play leader for a crew and can let his guard down, or at least maintain a haggard-yet-guarded front for Corfixen’s camera. When a camera’s involved, intimate disclosures only go so far, even if you’re married.

Ryan Gosling appears in a few of these off-set sequences. The eye gravitates toward him—star power in action. These scenes with Gosling have a sly, jokey, almost mockumentary feel, which makes them especially entertaining. While Refn explains his ideas about the similarities between violence and sex, Gosling smirks at the camera like Jim from The Office. I wouldn’t mind a mini-series starring Refn and Gosling together on the road, sort of like Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

Nicolas Winding Refn

Despite a few enjoyable scenes, My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn is only semi-interesting. Even at just an hour long, the material is thin and superficial, less a crafted non-fiction narrative and more a home movie. At worst, it’s a glorified featurette for the Only God Forgives Blu-ray. Even fans of Refn might shrug the documentary off. If you aren’t familiar with Refn’s work or Only God Forgives, you might wonder why that man in a beautiful hotel is so depressed.

Refn comes across too worried and too self-absorbed for the film to be self-congratulatory, and so the documentary avoids becoming a complete vanity project. Yet there’s a sense of self-importance that’s unwarranted. Only God Forgives may have been low-budget, but apart from the usual on-set challenges, nothing seemed especially noteworthy. Sure, it’s Refn’s big critical and commercial failure, but he bounces back from it unscathed.

Toward the end, Refn complains that he’s wasted six months of his family’s life. Consider the Herculean struggles in other documentaries about making movies, such asThe Burden of Dreams, Hearts of Darkness, or Lost in La Mancha. By comparison, Refn’s problems, while legitimate and disheartening, seem like temporary frustrations rather than existential struggles for authenticity or the difference between subsistence and going hungry. As the documentary shows, Refn’s problems are nothing that a good sulk won’t fix.