‘Paralyzed By Hope: The Maria Bamford Story’ Netflix Review: Judd Apatow Charts How a Cult Stand-Up Turned Her Struggles Into a Unique Comic Voice

One of the great documentaries in the history of cinema, Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, focused on cartoonist Robert Crumb but also on his brothers, particularly Charles. At least as talented as Robert, Charles suffered from severe psychiatric disorders that kept him from developing his artistic career. Robert, who had his own mental-health struggles, managed to channel his demons into his comics, while Charles was essentially paralyzed by them. I thought about the two of them several times while watching Paralyzed By Hope, because Maria Bamford could almost be seen as both brothers rolled into one: the cult artist and the deeply troubled recluse.

As this documentary, directed by Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley, makes clear, Bamford has also managed to keep the functional side of her personality alive, sometimes by the slimmest of margins: the part that can turn disorder into art, trauma into comedy. A stand-up comedian with a highly distinctive style, Bamford puts her psychiatric problems front and center and makes jokes about them. Over the years, she has built a career out of playing with voices, creating characters, talking to herself and turning all of it into a singular form of comedy that many of her peers describe as unlike anything else. It can be very funny and, at the same time, quietly painful.

A longtime fan, Apatow sat down with Bamford for what became a series of interviews and organizes the film in fairly conventional documentary fashion: conversations with the comedian, comments and anecdotes from colleagues, friends and people close to her (including her sister and her former partner), and plenty of clips from her various appearances over the years. Now 56, Bamford has spent more than three decades working in stand-up, but she has also done television (including her own series, Lady Dynamite, whose two seasons are on Netflix, a company that has consistently supported her thanks in no small part to superfan Ted Sarandos), YouTube videos, commercials, a handful of movies, extensive voice work in animation and even some wonderfully odd solo stage shows. There is, in other words, more than enough material to capture her.

Those decades of work are interwoven with a complicated personal life, which the film traces chronologically, beginning with her social difficulties as a child and teenager and continuing through a series of conflicts, disorders and other problems — bipolar disorder, depression, OCD and various other issues — that have affected her personal life. She has usually been able to work through these difficult subjects in her brutally honest comedy, but there have also been periods when they landed her in psychiatric hospitals or left her in situations that were much harder to navigate. Bamford speaks openly about her medications, her most difficult periods, her complicated and changing relationship with her mother (the most important figure in her life) and the constant ups and downs of her mental health.

Along with Sarandos, the film features colleagues and admirers including Sarah Silverman, Conan O’Brien, Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Colbert — who calls her his favorite comedian — Tig Notaro and many others. They offer stories from the old days (Oswalt and Galifianakis worked with her early in their careers) and talk about their admiration not only for her comedy but for the way she has managed, in a sense, to use it to tame all those ghosts. But the most revealing thing is always watching Bamford perform, particularly because we know that, unlike Norm, Apatow’s previous documentary, this material is all true. Or, more precisely, it is a slightly exaggerated version of something real, with a punchline attached.

“I never saw myself as a depressed person, but more as someone paralyzed by hope,” Bamford says at one point, offering perhaps the best description of the paradox at the center of her life. She explains, simply but movingly, how comedy has allowed her to become functional. “I love being onstage because I can feel connected to people while also being in a safe place.” Ultimately, Paralyzed By Hope is about that: the way artists incorporate their problems, traumas and demons into their work, and how that work can sometimes end up saving them. The boundary between genius and madness is a delicate one. Bamford’s documentary finds the humor in that boundary, which is probably the only way to tell her story.