The American docmaker continues to query ideas of nonfiction authorship, authenticity and performance in his latest, centered on a working-class Missouri family brimming with conflicting needs and narratives.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
Courtesy of Robert Kolodny Everyone’s a main character in “Too Much Sugar,” a scrappy, agitated, spikily entertaining study of an extended family with a whole community’s worth of backstory, present-tense drama and diverging plans for the future. Only one person in it, however, has main character syndrome. That would be Ryan “Holli-wood” Hollinger, a self-styled patriarch with six children by five women, whose seemingly self-chosen nickname says much about how he perceives his place in the world — relative, at least, to the modest hand that life has dealt him as a former amateur MMA fighter and sometime carpenter in small-town Missouri. To a point, Robert Greene‘s quicksilver new documentary indulges that perception, making Ryan the star performer of a roving cinematic tour through his life and loves — until others in his shadow seize the spotlight for themselves.
Related Stories
