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| Posted on Friday, January 10 @ 00:00:10 PST |
By John Serba ,
1 hours ago
You’re probably at least peripherally aware of the subject of Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (now on Netflix): Bryan Johnson has a significant social media presence for being that weirdo rich guy who takes a zillion pills every day in an attempt to reverse the aging process. This documentary from prolific nonfiction director Chris Smith ( American Movie , Mr. McMahon , The Yes Men and many others) aims to humanize the meme, digging into the details and background of Johnson’s life, and the crazy-strict regimen he follows, which apparently requires frequent shirtlessness. Armchair psychoanalysts, start your engines!
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The Gist: Major irony alert: Johnson once was suicidal, but now he does everything he possibly can to make sure he lives as long as possible. I almost typed “make sure he never dies,” but that’s not a realistic goal.
But a man can dream, I guess. Johnson wears T-shirts with the words DON’T DIE on them in big block letters, and has turned his life into one big experiment to see how long he can live. He calls the endeavor Project Blueprint, and it’s – well, I was going to say “insane,” but that’s passing judgment, so let’s just call it extreme as all hell.
Project Blueprint costs Johnson $2 million a year. He takes various supplements and drugs numbering north of 100 pills a day. He goes to bed at 8:30 p.m. and sleeps an average of 8.34 hours a night. He undergoes countless blood tests and treatments, listed in an array of bullet points on the screen (one of them, no joke, is “penis shockwave therapy”). He maintains strict workout and eating regimes, and is in the 99th percentile of muscle and body fat. I don’t think the botox, hair plugs and body waxes are necessary for his goals, but he apparently wants to maintain the visage of youth to match the “biological age” of his blood, which, per the data, is five years younger than his actual age (47 as of this writing). His body ages eight months every year, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to tell you that’s four months better than the rest of us.
A lot of what he does is bleeding-edge experimental stuff that’s only been the subject of trials on lab mice, rendering him a human guinea pig of sorts.
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The doc doesn’t say how many hours a day he commits to the program, but it sure seems to be the equivalent of a full-time job. He can afford it – he’s a former tech-startup entrepreneur who built a payment-processing company, Braintree, and sold it to Paypal for $800 million. Resources aren’t a problem. It’s not explicitly stated in the film, but Project Blueprint is a financial investment, too – Johnson and his assistant, Kate Tolo, have developed a social media presence that translates to branded supplement sales (including a $35 bottle of olive oil he jokingly brands as Snake Oil), which almost certainly gets a boost every time he shows off his shredded torso for a photo shoot, which is rather often, even for the doc’s cameras. It’s also made him famous, an internet weirdo who inspired hot takes criticizing him as a rich guy doing things the average person can’t, and as a narcissist who spends so much time trying to dodge death, he isn’t truly living. He shares all the most intimate data of his regime, opening it up for scrutiny.
“His rectum went viral,” one commentator says. “His rectal biological age.”
And so we get into some of Johnson’s motives, via his background. He was raised a strict Mormon, without much money. He has an entrepreneurial spirit; Braintree was his third startup. The business was a source of significant stress, and he felt deeply discontent in his marriage, religion and work life. He struggled with deep depression that found him lying in bed for hours on weekends. ‘I didn’t want consciousness at all,” he says. When he hit bottom, he sold the company, got a divorce, quit the church and realized he needed to stop listening to his mind and start listening to his body. He essentially developed an algorithm for life that divorces motive from his thoughts and feelings, and listens to the needs of his organs. He followed this philosophy as he developed his unusual enterprise. It meant isolating himself – leaving the church resulted in estrangement from two of his three children.
Eventually, Johnson’s son Talmage accepted those changes and moved in with his father for less than a year as he finished high school and headed to college; we see the two of them working out together, Talmage’s adoption of some elements of his father’s regime resulting in a deeper bond between them.
Similar bonding also happens with Johnson’s father, and the three of them end up taking part in a tri-generational experiment where the grandson donates plasma to his father who then donates plasma to the grandfather. Weird. And scientifically questionable. But they seemed to be happier and closer after their unusual bonding experience. Most of us dudes might watch a football game or, I dunno, build a soap box derby racer together. The internet commentariat called Johnson a “vampire.” But really, who are we to judge?
PHOTO: Netflix What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Add Don’t Die to the profiles-of-rich-weirdos docs like Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee or Smith’s Richard Branson series Branson .
Performance Worth Watching: Journalist Ashlee Vance – a credited producer of the film – routinely shares reasonable commentary throughout Don’t Die , which is absolutely vital to its credibility, and cuts through the internet-reactionary hot-take bull roar that to this point has defined Johnson’s public persona.
Memorable Dialogue: Vance: “If you want to live the Bryan Johnson lifestyle, the commitment to it is obscene.”
Sex and Skin: Near-chronic Johnson shirtlessness; he also poses for a nude photoshoot, although we don’t see crack or bits.
Our Take: Hot take: Johnson’s life won’t work for anybody, but it may work for him. It doesn’t matter if you think that his trips to a no-regulations region in Honduras for gene therapy (don’t worry, it doesn’t irreversibly alter your DNA, promises one researcher) are the act of an obsessive lunatic, because it’s his choice to make himself the subject of out-there experimentation. Johnson hopes to spearhead research and techniques that will eventually be applicable to people who don’t have $400 million in the bank, but the scientific viability of his endeavor is in question – one talking-head scientist points out that Johnson takes so many treatments, drugs and supplements, it’s impossible to tell which ones are effective.
So Don’t Die at least has enough objectivity to poke some holes in Johnson’s – for lack of a better word – philosophy, and it doesn’t come off as a promotional puff piece. Prior to now, the loudest commentary on the topic at hand has come from reply guys and yakkity-yakkers on podcasts and The View or whatever, so Smith interviews credible members of the scientific community whose valid skepticism carries the weight of expertise. Without established clinical trials, some of them conclude, Johnson’s self-experimentation isn’t particularly valuable; some insist that his money would be better invested in said trials.
Which isn’t to say the doc covers all the bases – it’s frustratingly shallow in its probing of healthcare systems that treat symptoms in lieu of preventative medicine. It also doesn’t discuss how individual genetics are a significant factor in the success of Johnson’s techniques, or contextualize the subculture of anti-aging, um, enthusiasts? Nutjobs? Cults? None or all of the above?
Regardless, those on the leading edge of progress are often labeled as such, and it’ll take time to determine if they were on to something or not. The science of Johnson’s endeavor is undeniably fascinating, and Smith’s deepish dive into his subject’s psychology is a perfect bedfellow for this film. There’s a weird, semi-detached quality to Johnson’s personality and appearance that beg comparison to Michael Fassbender’s humanoid android in the Alien movies, and it’s crucial that we see Johnson interact with his son in a sincere and affectionate manner – cue the scene in which Johnson weeps loudly on Talmage’s shoulder in the middle of a Target, shopping for towels for the kid’s dorm room. Johnson may want to detach himself from his mind, but he’s still human, and his pursuit of anti-aging perfection may be one of his all-too-human flaws.
Our Call: The internet’s first-pass stone-throwing at Johnson justifies Don’t Die ’s existence, and it’s a perfectly entertaining second pass on a semi-famous eccentric who’s doing something that’s either revolutionary or ridiculous. Fascinating story either way. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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