Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans

Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans serves two pur­pos­es: it’s a love let­ter to a man the direc­tor clear­ly admires, and it is an exam­i­na­tion of a failed vision, of an auteur who couldn’t get on the same page with the stu­dios, and whose fail­ure, like that of all ​‘great men’, was noble. It’s a tricky bal­anc­ing act, and the film fails to strike an even tone throughout.

By this point, McQueen is a myth; short­hand for a type of mas­culin­i­ty that, depend­ing on your gen­der pol­i­tics, is either sad­ly lost or thank­ful­ly left behind. The film def­i­nite­ly belongs to the for­mer camp, and McQueen is our hero in the begin­ning and he remains so to the end. How­ev­er, it is not sim­ply a nos­tal­gic romp: his first wife plays a size­able role in the doc­u­men­tary, and the exam­i­na­tion of his more dan­ger­ous actions prob­lema­tis­es his per­sona. The movie eschews hagiog­ra­phy, but wants us to per­ceive him as wor­thy of our admi­ra­tion, spend­ing too much time try­ing to achieve this.

The oth­er, more suc­cess­ful side of the doc­u­men­tary explores McQueen as auteur. He want­ed to make a rac­ing movie he could be proud of, a real­is­tic film about the Le Mans expe­ri­ence. McQueen’s per­sona has always sug­gest­ed hid­den depths, and the film suc­cess­ful­ly explores what can hap­pen when a man pur­sues his dream relent­less­ly, with every­thing else a dis­tant sec­ond. The fall­out and unin­tend­ed con­se­quences dri­ve the nar­ra­tive and offer a glimpse of what it’s like to be drawn into the vor­tex of movie star charisma.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the doc­u­men­tary real­ly works when it focus­es on the dri­ving and not the man. ​“It’s a work of art,” mus­es one of the dri­vers, when dis­cussing race­track dri­ving. He com­pares it to bal­let, and when the film is on the rac­ing track, cam­era swerv­ing with each bend, asphalt glis­ten­ing, it does become that. In those moments you can see McQueen’s vision, why he want­ed to cap­ture it the way he did. They hint at the great movie that could have been – in both cases.