sThe Josh Greenbaum documentary Will & Harper is showing at select theaters now. The film will stream on Netflix beginning September 27th. Will & Harper screened at the 2024 Nashville Film Festival. The movie originally premiered at the 40th Sundance Film Festival in January 2024. The 114-minute documentary depicts Will Ferrell’s 17-day cross-country trip with his close friend of 30 years, Harper Steele. Harper has just come out as a transgender female. Over 250 hours of film was shot! And then cut to a 2-hour look at being transgender in America in 2024. Harper was born Andrew Steele in Iowa City, Iowa, one of five children of University of Iowa professors. Harper was the head writer at “Saturday Night Live” and started the same week that Ferrell in 1995.
THE GOOD
55th Nashville Film Festival, Sept. 19-25, 2024.
The best thing about the unscripted 17-day trip from New York to Santa Monica, California was how authentic and genuine the emotional relationship between Ferrell and Steele appears to be. Both are reduced to tears, at times, and you will be, too. Nashville Film Festival viewers come away with the feeling that Will Ferrel in real life is very much like his character in “Elf” as one of the nicest guys you could know. As a stranger in an Oklahoma City bar tells him, “I like your support for your friends. There’s not a lot of it out there now.” Many have commented on how brave Harper is to have come out. There should also be praise for Will Ferrell (and friends) for being so supportive of Harper in MAGA America.
The trailer for the film shows Ferrell reading from the e-mail he received from Steele. He learns that his old buddy will be undergoing transgender surgery and will now go by the name Harper. Ferrell realizing, somewhat belatedly, that he doesn’t really know enough about the transgender community. He proposed a 17-day cross-country road trip in Steele’s vintage Jeep Wagoneer to re-acquaint the new old friends. The camera crew follows them discreetly during the trip. We learn the purpose of the documentary with the question “What are the new ground rules? How much has changed? How much is the same?” Steele has a reputation as someone who loves to take cross-country trips. Harper loves to stop at dive bars, diners, and other such places—all of which sound dicey for a transgender woman traveling solo in the United States in 2024. Will would be able to run interference for his longtime friend as they criss-crossed America.
The music (Nathan Halpern) is very good, including the idea of having Kirsten Wiig write a “theme song” for their trip (She sings it at film’s end), a recurring joke. The cinematography—including a stop at the Grand Canyon—is also wonderful. Harper” is simply a real-life, honest serio-comic gem amidst a sea of boring drek.
THE STOPS
The pair set out from New York and made stops in Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, Iowa City, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Las Vegas and various other cities, most of them in “red” states. They were received well everywhere but Texas, where rude tweets follow the duo’s appearance at a steakhouse (Ferrell dressed as Sherlock Holmes and attempting to eat a 72-ounce steak). One Texas tweet that commented on the stop the pair had just made at Harper’s sister Eleanor’s house in Iowa City, called Ferrell “a Satanic illuminati pedophile in Iowa.” But the general reception was the opposite, although one critic has asked the obvious question: is that because a celebrity was running interference for Harper? (Others wondered about product placement, since Pringles and Duncan Donuts get a lot of conversational time,)
IOWA CITY & SORROW
Harper’s sister, Eleanor, when she received the same e-mail that Ferrell got, responded to him quickly, “Oh, good! I’ve always wanted a sister.” However, when the pair actually stops for the night at her home in my old college town, Ferrell asks her what her reaction was upon receiving the news. She admits that “I was totally surprised.” The emotion she felt was “sorrow.”
I felt that sorrow, too, when Harper shared journal snippets of the pain experienced for decades: “It wasn’t about body parts. It was about how I am in my head. Fix me or kill me,” is one entry. “A lot of transitioning is learning to accept yourself” is another truth reveal. We learn this in Peoria, Illinois, in a meeting with a 65-year-old transgender woman on the road. “I dream of a world where I can lay my vulnerabilities out there for anyone…I knew something was weird in me growing up in Iowa, but it was impossible to think of doing anything about it.”
In a world where gay men are being executed in some countries, you just want to repeat Rodney King’s mantra. May 1, 1992, King called a press conference in hopes of stopping the death and destruction after the L.A. riots. “I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?”
CONCLUSION
This is a gem of a documentary, which contains so much pain and yet provokes so much laughter. One can’t help but smile when Ferrell, asked about his share of piloting the vintage automobile cross country responds, “I’m a narcoleptic and I’m not a good driver.”
As the theme song for the documentary goes, “a friend is a friend is a friend till the end.”
Catch this one when it streams on Netflix beginning September 27th.
