‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story’ review: A moving story of an actor’s heroism, onscreen and off

By his own description, the actor, disability activist and forever-Superman Christopher Reeve was “a pretty good rider.” In 1995, thrown from his horse during a competition, Reeve suffered a paralyzing spinal cord injury. The irony was cruel, and all-too-glibly repeated around the world: The Man of Steel, laid low and nearly immobile, unable to breathe without a tube.

What Reeve did with his post-injury years was remarkable and, yes, inspirational. Metaphorically he rose to an extraordinarily tough occasion, advocating on behalf of disability research funding on a broad scale, and achieving a degree of movement recovery few thought was possible. All this is well-covered in the slick but genuinely moving new documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.”

The film also reveals how Reeve, launched into a peculiar, typecast kind of stardom in his 20s with the 1978 release of “Superman,” navigated a childhood marked by an impossible-to-please father; his battling parents’ divorce when Reeve was three; his parents’ subsequent remarriages and divorces; and the aspiring young actor’s ping-pong upbringing “between two families and neither one seemed truly secure,” as Reeve describes it at one point in the documentary’s archival footage.

Arriving in New York City after studying at Cornell University, Reeve leveled up at Juilliard, where he made a crucial lifelong friend in classmate Robin Williams. Reeve scored an audition for “Superman” in 1977 while he was performing off-Broadway with Jeff Daniels (interviewed in “Super/Man”) and William Hurt. His friend Daniels was supportive; Hurt called him a sellout even before Reeve got the role.

Made with the full cooperation of Reeve’s family, “Super/Man” avoids many of the limitations and image-management initiatives that ordinarily mark such documentaries. The complications of the adult Reeve’s romantic and parental lives repeated a lot of troubling dynamics of his own fraught childhood. Fame, courtesy of “Superman,” led to more opportunities but also some frustrating Hollywood typecasting and some surprisingly lean years He never really had the career he wanted without the cape.

His competitive spirit and devotion to so many pursuits, from flying to sailing to horses and skiing, kept Reeve in near-perpetual motion until 1995. By the time of the accident, he had a son and daughter by way of a 10-year relationship with British modeling agent Gae Exton (they met at the dining room in London’s Pinewood Studios). Then, in Reeve’s marriage to actress and singer Dana Morosini, he had a third son. In the documentary directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui (“McQueen”), Reeve and others talk in various interviews across the years about how the actor learned to commit to his most important relationships.

As he says at one point, with disarming candor: “I needed to break my neck to learn some of this stuff.”

The movie’s fresh interview footage with Reeve’s children and friends and colleagues creates a mosaic of a densely packed life, interrupted, and another life, met not easily but valiantly. The film’s central visual conceit imagines Reeve’s Superman, cast in concrete, floating through space, laced with digital effects depictions of what the spinal cord injury has done to his body. Does the film need it? Maybe, maybe not. Or maybe simply less of it. The same goes for the musical score, which rarely shuts up. The film’s emotional impact is such that the swells of sonic feeling have a way of crowding our responses to Reeve’s story.

The later scenes include Reeve’s return to the Oscars in 1996, and subsequent public and private triumphs and setbacks he and his family experienced until his death in 2004 at 52. Then, heartbreakingly, his wife Dana Reeve died two years later, of lung cancer. Their children, now grown, continue their work with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. “Super/Man” should introduce many people, young and older, to a fine actor’s work and, more importantly, to what Reeve accomplished for himself and so many others in the life he was dealt.

“Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for some strong language and thematic elements)

Running time: 1:44

How to watch: Premieres Oct. 11

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.