Lightning In A Bottle

HBO’s Robin Williams documentary attempts to capture his explosive talent. There’s probably no bottle big enough, but this comes pretty close

- Zach Schonfeld

ON JUNE 11, 2004, BILLY CRYSTAL was watching Ronald Reagan’s funeral on TV. His phone rang.

“Bill,” the voice on the other end said. “Hi. It’s Ron Reagan.” It sounded just like the 40th president—the friendly voice, the folksy affect. “I wanted to tell you that I’m in heaven now. I’m having a wonderful time.” Crystal played along: “Oh, really? What’s heaven like?” “Well,” the voice replied, “it’s a lot hotter than I thought it would be.”

Crystal tells this story in the new HBO documentary Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, about one of the many prank calls from his longtime friend. It was classic Williams: a riotous gag from a man with an insatiable desire to make people laugh. Williams took his life on August 11, 2014, and the new film, by director Marina Zenovich, is a reminder of just how singular his talent was.

The documentary takes its ambiguously naughty title from an early Williams routine, a typically manic bit in which he mimics the panicky brain of a comedian struggling to land a joke. He winds up flailing around in distress, like a shipwrecked sea captain:

“Mayday! Mayday!” The subtext: For Williams, landing a joke was a function of survival. “That laugh is a drug,” Crystal says in the film, and “really hard to replace with anything else.”