If the embed above has vanished into the shadows of Hell’s Kitchen or been quietly set to private, you can watch the documentary here: Frank Miller: American Genius (Stash – Free Documentaries, YouTube).
Somewhere in the long boxes of every comics fan over a certain age lurks a copy of The Dark Knight Returns with a cracked spine, a coffee ring on the cover and the faint smell of 1986 still clinging to its pages. If yours is in there, here is the perfect excuse to dig it out. Frank Miller: American Genius, Silenn Thomas’s documentary portrait of the man who sent a fifty-something Bruce Wayne back out into the storm to punch mutants and annoy the Reagan administration, is free to watch in full above, all two-ish hours of it.
And before anybody reaches for the green ink: this is no bootleg, shot sideways from the back row of a multiplex by a bloke with a camcorder and a heavy cold. The film has been put up legitimately on YouTube by Stash – Free Documentaries, an ad-supported channel that streams documentaries gratis, credited to Thomas as director and producer. The only price of admission is the occasional advert, which, given what an Absolute edition costs these days, is the sort of bargain that would make the Kingpin suspicious.
The film has had a curious, slow-burn sort of release. Thomas is Miller’s longtime producing partner, with whom he runs Frank Miller Ink, and the documentary got a one-night-only American cinema outing via Picturehouse back in June 2024, with Miller introducing it live in conversation with Rosario Dawson. Since then it has been working the festival circuit, turning up at Ireland’s Fastnet Film Festival this May with Miller and Thomas on hand for the Q&A. Now it has landed on YouTube, which, let’s be honest, is where most of us were always going to watch it, with a mug of tea and the cat asleep on the trade paperbacks.
Thomas has said the project began at the urging of fans after Miller survived a near-death experience, with cameras rolling as his recovery was just getting under way. So set your expectations accordingly. This is a portrait made by a friend and collaborator, and the title is American Genius rather than American Footnote. The makers promise the full arc: small-town Vermont boyhood, the move to New York, Hollywood, the failures and successes, a spell of self-destruction and the long road back. Which is, when you think about it, the plot of roughly half of Miller’s own books, minus the trench coats.
The case for the “genius” part of the title is not hard to make. In 1979 Miller took Daredevil, a second-string Marvel book with one foot in the cancellation bin, and turned Hell’s Kitchen into film noir with ninjas, killing off Elektra in the process and making grown men weep into their Marvel UK reprints. Then came Ronin, then Daredevil: Born Again with David Mazzucchelli, then The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One back to back, which, together with a certain twelve-issue series from a pair of Brits, handed the rest of the decade its marching orders. The imitators learned the grimness and the grit. Very few of them learned the jokes, and DKR is a much funnier book than its reputation suggests. After that came Sin City at Dark Horse, 300, Give Me Liberty with Dave Gibbons and the gloriously over-detailed Hard Boiled with Geof Darrow, a comic in which you can count the individual screws on the debris.
Then there is the “American” part, which brings in Hollywood, where the course of true love never did run smooth. Miller’s RoboCop 2 screenplay was famously put through the studio mincer in 1990, and he retreated to comics for over a decade before Robert Rodriguez coaxed him back for Sin City in 2005, quitting the Directors Guild so Miller could share the directing credit. Zack Snyder’s 300 followed, slow-motion and all. And then came the stretch that even devotees tend to discuss in the tone usually reserved for a relative’s second marriage: The Spirit, Holy Terror, and the “goddamn Batman” of All-Star Batman & Robin. Whether the documentary lingers there or tiptoes past with its torch switched off is something you’ll have to find out for yourself.
The roll call of talking heads is the sort of thing that makes a convention organiser go pale with envy. Stan Lee, Neal Adams and Richard Donner all appear, all now sadly departed, which tells you how long this film has been in the oven. Old collaborators include Klaus Janson, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walt Simonson, John Romita Jr, Dave Gibbons, Geof Darrow and letterer John Workman, while the later Dark Knight crew of Brian Azzarello, Andy Kubert and Rafael Grampá also turn up. Add Jim Lee, Dan DiDio, Paul Pope, Eduardo Risso, Rafael Albuquerque and political cartoonist Jeff Danziger, then a Hollywood contingent of Snyder, Rodriguez, Jessica Alba, Jaime King and Rosario Dawson, and you have enough talent in one film to staff a Marvel bullpen circa 1983 and still have somebody left over to make the tea.
Anyone wanting the case for the prosecution on Miller’s later politics will need to bring their own; this one, by design, is the case for the defence. But as a two-hour sit-down with one of the handful of creators who genuinely changed what a comic could look like, and what it was allowed to say, it costs nothing and requires neither a subscription nor a credit card. You don’t even have to stand in the rain in a fedora to watch it, although, frankly, it would help with the atmosphere.
Frank Miller: American Genius (2024), written, produced and directed by Silenn Thomas, is free to watch on YouTube via Stash – Free Documentaries.
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