DN:FILM The Great Buster

Like that, Buster Keaton is airborne. Off his feet, he flies, flips and flops, kabooming on his keister. His patented porkpie hat tumbles. A small dust storm encircles him. His expression, total unbudging bemusement, doesn’t flinch. Wonder what fine Keaton comedy this scene is from? Name it. It’s that one. And it’s that one, too. As shown in Peter Bogdanovich’s THE GREAT BUSTER: A CELEBRATION, the revolutionary silent-era auteur was a repeat artist, who riffed on and reinvented his stuntsmanship in dozens of pictures. The balletic, diminutive daredevil—whose resting sad face and huge, hangdog eyes earned him the sobriquet the Great Stone Face—forged his own lexicon for the spectacular, death-defying pratfall.

This worshipful doc, tailored to the movie-mad, starts with a primer on Keaton’s vaudevillian childhood, smash stage shows in which his father hurled his son like a football, the root of his penchant for flight. Bogdanovich, narrating in a nasal drone, then dedicates the first hour to Keaton’s early, popular short films with Fatty Arbuckle, leapfrogging to his creatively neutered years at MGM, mid-career alcoholism and, in the '50s and '60s, a busy life of movie cameos, TV appearances and ads, until his death from lung cancer in 1966. Almost all of it’s fascinating, if occasionally and unsurprisingly depressing.

In the doc’s final 40 minutes, Bogdanovich circles back to the 10 “priceless” features Keaton made through the 1920s, threading a festive note. Swollen with lengthy, smartly culled clips and dotted with chatty heads as disparate as Dick Van Dyke, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog and Johnny Knoxville, who throw little more than pinhole beams on Keaton’s genius, the doc lavishly and lovingly examines the classics Keaton wrote, directed and starred in. These paragons of pratfall and pantomime include: “Three Ages;” “Sherlock Jr.;” “The Navigator;” “The General” (the pricey Civil War comedy considered his masterstroke); “College;” and Keaton’s last independent feature, “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” That’s a hell of a streak. “The Great Buster” is a full-throated tribute that can be forgiven its stodgy straightforwardness for all the joyous innovation, physical wit and cinematic awe Keaton supplies: the face-plants, cliff leaps, train-dodges and stair-stumbles—feats that leave him, and us, floating on air.