WARNING: SPOILERS

People don’t understand what Christopher Reeve meant to comic-book-collecting nerds like me in the 1970s. We had nobody. I mean, nobody. For the first half of the decade, the greatest live-action superheroes were Evel Knievel and the Fonz. I watched “The Electric Company” for 1-2 minute installments of “Spidey Super Stories,” in which the webslinger didn’t do anything super, he wasn’t even vocal, he just spoke in word balloons and tripped through comic panels. I stayed up late one Friday to watch “It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman!” a TV rendering of a 10-year-old Broadway musical that attempted to do with Supes what William Dozier and company had done with Batman in the 1960s—make him relevant through satire—and, well, didn’t.

A Doc Savage movie with Ron Ely? That might be interesting! No? Then I’ll just read the book. They’re doing a “Spider-Man” TV show starring one of the Von Trapp kids? I’m there. Wait, and a live-action “Hulk”? How is that even possible?

The point is we barely got anything, and if we did they botched it, and when they cast it they tended to cast it wrong.

And then along comes “Superman: The Movie” with an unknown in the lead, and he … was … perfect. You couldn’t have drawn a better Superman. Plus he was able to act as both Superman and Clark? Make the world’s worst superhero subterfuge vaguely credible? Wow. In the middle of that blow-dried decade, they even got the spitcurl right.

Meaning I was the perfect audience for a documentary about Christopher Reeve. So why did it take me so long to watch it?

We know why. 

The super part
In my defense, last year was a busy year, and a crappy year, which is why I missed the doc during its theatrical run last fall. And once it made it onto HBO, I couldn’t get anyone to watch it with me: wife, fellow nerds, no one. Eventually a friend signed on. We watched it in the wake of its BAFTA win for best documentary feature.

For a decade Christopher Reeve played the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy figure and everyone wanted to see him; and then his life became the opposite of that and no one wanted to see him. They averted their eyes. We averted our eyes. “Super/Man” encompasses both halves of that life, with an emphasis on the latter. Which, in its way, is the super part.

I didn’t know his father was a scholar. I vaguely remember the “Man and Superman” story—how Dad was impressed that his son got the part until he found out it was Jerry Siegel rather than George Bernard Shaw. Dad was handsome, too. That’s where Chris got his looks, which he then passed onto his handsome children. Everyone’s handsome in this thing. It’s also where he got his drive. His father was a driven man who remained unimpressed with the son’s accomplishments, which made the son even more driven. “He was an intense guy, he didn’t do anything half-assed,” says Chris’ son Matt. “You could not fail and quit. It was like, ‘You try, you fail, you try harder.’”

I knew about the weight training for “Superman”—at a time when weight training wasn’t a thing—but I didn’t know, for example, that he learned to horseback ride while playing Count Vronsky in a TV movie, “Anna Karenina,” in 1985. Did he go Tolstoy to impress his father, a Russian scholar who accompanied Robert Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962? Either way, it got Reeve into horseback riding; and it was a horseback riding accident, being thrown and landing on his head, that led to the spinal chord injury that left him paralyzed below the neck. It was May 1995. He was only 42.

He flatlined twice. The doc includes voiceovers from Reeve’s memoir, “Still Me,” and there’s a poignant one with his wife Dana in the immediate aftermath of the accident:

Dana came into the room, she knelt down next to me and we made eye contact. And then I mouthed my first lucid words to her: “Maybe we should let me go.” Dana started crying. She said, “I’m only going to say this once: I will support whatever you want to do, because this is your life and your decision. But I want you to know that I’ll be with you for the long haul, no matter what.”

And then she added the words that saved my life: “You’re still you, and I love you.”

I came away with huge respect for Christopher Reeve and his kids, and for many of their friends—particularly Robin Williams, his roommate at Julliard, who was always there for him, always fighting for him, always using his superpower, laughter, to make things better—but Dana Reeve is truly Superwoman. What positive energy she exudes under impossible circumstances. What a bright light.

The doc keeps cutting back from Reeve’s final years to his rise in the 1970s—a good way to handle it. Jeff Daniels recalls being in an off-off-Broadway play with Reeve and William Hurt when Reeve casually mentioned he had to go to London for a screen test. When he said it was for “Superman” Hurt tried to talk him out of it. He wouldn’t be doing the culture a favor, was the gist. Others brought up Brando and Hackman—already cast—but Hurt was adament. We can laugh now, particularly since Hurt played Gen. “Thunderbolt” Ross in the Marvel movies, but he wasn’t exactly wrong: “Superman” by itself was no problem but we’ve overindulged. Hurt also wound up with the ’80s career Reeve wanted: leading man in prestigious films. In the late ’80s, both men starred in indictments of the news business. “Broadcast News” was acclaimed and nominated for seven Oscars, including lead actor for Hurt; “Switching Channels” was panned and nominated for two Razzies, including supporting for Reeve.

For Reeve, these were the diminishing returns, evidenced by how well the Superman movies did. The box office kept dropping as the quality kept dropping:

• Superman (1978): $134 million
• Superman II (1981): $108 million
• Superman III (1983): $60 million
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987): $15 million

He tried comedy with “Noises Off,” and played the American in “Remains of the Day,” but by the ’90s he was mostly doing TV movies. Superman is a tough role to shake.

After the accident he became another kind of symbol, another kind of inspiration. The doctor who treated him, Steven Kirshblum, recalls a boy with a spinal cord injury who had tried to wean off the ventilator, failed, and didn’t try again because he didn’t want to fail again. “Chris went and spoke to him,” Kirshblum recalls. “And the boy simply said, ‘Christopher Reeve spoke to me, I’m going to wean.’”

The drive that he got from his father (and his father’s disinterest), Reeve now brought to his impossible situation. He directed movies. He acted in a TV version of “Rear Window” (shown here) and in episodes of “Smallville” (not shown). His first big public appearance after the accident was at the 1996 Academy Awards, where he got a standing ovation and made a case for greater funding and visibility for spinal cord injuries. “I think the fact that Superman was in a wheelchair, and was willing to go public with it, was huge,” says Glenn Close. Whoopi Goldberg, who hosted that night, gets right at the issue. She talks about the strength Reeve had dealing with “lots and lots of people trying not to look you with pity.” And that wasn’t just there; that was everyday.

The biggest sin
“Man/Superman: The Christopher Reeve Story,” written and directed by Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui, makes you cognizant of everything you take for granted: standing, walking, breathing. But it’s not just eat-your-vegetables. There’s joy in it. How can there not be? It’s Superman. I remember in college watching the movie on TV with my friend Todd, and during the helicopter rescue scene I could feel this huge grin spreading on my face. And I looked over at Todd and he had the same. And we just sat there, two cynical college kids, with these stupid grins on our faces.

Perfect

I wish they’d included the clip of Tom Mankiewicz, creative consultant on the first movie, talking about what happened when Reeve finally got his screen test. The doc gives us the prelude: the people the Salkinds covetted didn’t want the role (Robert Redford), and the people who covetted the role the Salkinds didn’t want (Neil Diamond, Arnold Schwarzenegger). And all the people they screen-tested, the semi-knowns and unknowns, were all wrong. Nothing fit. Until Reeve. Here’s Mankiewicz.

He hopped off the balcony and said, “Good evening, Miss Lane.” And [cinematographer] Geoffrey Unsworth looked over at me and went [makes impressed face]. Because the tone was just right. He went through the test and we just knew we had him.

Reeve made progress against impossible odds. At one point, he was actually able to move parts of his extremities. The doc doesn’t mention his hair falling out but his Wiki page says he suffered from alopecia from an early age, and some post-accident meds exacerbated it. Life gives and then takes and keeps taking. In October 2004, he went into cardiac arrest, fell into a coma, and died 18 hours later. Within a year, Dana Reeve was diagnosed with cancer and died. “Unfair” doesn’t begin to cover it. I think of a word “Superman” director Richard Donner used in a DVD commentary from 2006. Reeve shows up onscreen and Donner says, “This is the biggest sin. This is the best kid that ever lived.”