Review: Stirring ‘Gleason’ documents an unsentimental embrace of life, but you’ll still cry

Get out your handkerchiefs.

Odds are high that you’ll be verklempt through much of the running time of “Gleason,” but those tears and the lump in your throat won’t merely be expressions of sorrow. As Steve Gleason, the extraordinary man at the center of the documentary, acknowledges at one point, his story is sad — and yet, he insists with good reason, “it’s not all sad.” If this film portrait stirs deep emotions, they spring from a breathtakingly unsentimental embrace of life at its most challenging.

Gleason’s story has been the subject of countless media reports, especially on sports-focused outlets, but the unblinking intimacy of the new film sets it apart. While still in his early 30s, the former NFL player was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the debilitating neurodegenerative condition also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the five years since, he has become an inspiring and relentless activist on behalf of people with ALS and other neuromuscular disorders.

But before he and his exuberantly no-nonsense wife, Michel Varisco, formed a foundation and launched its charitable work and legislative initiatives, Gleason embarked on a more personal project: a video blog addressed to his unborn son. It was six weeks after Gleason’s diagnosis when Varisco learned she was pregnant, and like the diagnosis itself, it charged them with purpose.

Several years’ worth of video shot by Gleason and two of his caregivers, David Lee and Ty Minton-Small, is the essence of director Clay Tweel’s documentary. In a take-no-prisoners race against the clock, the athlete measures his physical decline against the future timeline of his child’s development, determined to document everything he wants the boy to know. The depth of feeling in Gleason’s clear gaze and voice — which soon grows halting and eventually is provided by speech-generating technology — all but bursts off the screen.

The emotional nudges of the music score can feel intrusive and are certainly unnecessary with such powerful material. But Tweel, who followed a bizarre pop-culture story to its unexpectedly poignant postscript in “Finders Keepers,” shapes the many hours of previously recorded footage into a narrative as inspiring as it is wrenching.

This is a movie about fathers and sons as much as one about the devastating realities of an incurable disease. While bonding with his beautiful boy, Rivers, Gleason resolves to work out the disconnect between him and his own dad and get their relationship “in order.” Two of the film’s most potently unguarded scenes involve the push-pull between his father’s born-again Christianity and his own nonsectarian spirituality. Early in his illness, at his father’s urging, Gleason gives a faith healer a try, to Varisco’s blunt-spoken dismay. Later, in a confrontation both harrowing and tender, he insists, with every ounce of strength he can muster, that his father put aside dogma and accept him as he is.

“Gleason” is also a story of two ferociously smart, funny people building a family, augmented by the “badass unit” of caretakers that Varisco assembles. (The film doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of their no doubt astronomical medical expenses.) The rain that threatened Varisco and Gleason’s wedding didn’t worry them, and that head-on resilience sustains them when a storm of merciless intensity upends their lives. Together and separately, there are days of unquenchable despair. To his credit, Tweel lets marital impasses play out at discomforting, unresolved length.

With insight and a piercingly irreverent sense of humor, the athlete is keenly aware of the comical “polarities, dichotomies, juxtapositions” that characterize many of his days. When Gleason’s former teammates describe his athleticism, they use such words and phrases as “kamikaze” and “a few screws loose.” A showman and an unconventional free spirit on and off the field as a safety for the New Orleans Saints, he came to symbolize a ravaged city’s renewal. Outside the Superdome, a statue named “Rebirth” commemorates a crucial play he made in the opening minutes of the team’s first post-Katrina home game.

It’s not clear what Gleason was focused on during the three years between his retirement from football and his ALS diagnosis. “Rebirth” might not be the right word to describe his response to the bad news, but it’s certainly part of the equation. One of the first things he did after learning of his condition was to set off for a two-month trip through Alaska. Back home, he faced death and found a new purpose. He faced the camera lens, shared his pain and declared his love. His story will grab you and, quite possibly, shake you to the core.

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‘Gleason’

MPAA rating: R, for language

Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes

Playing: ArcLight Hollywood; The Landmark, West Los Angeles