The Most Revealing Part of the Louis C.K. Documentary Isn’t the Allegations

Six years ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, the street outside the Ryerson Theatre was swarmed with people desperate to get into the world premiere of I Love You, Daddy, the new film by Louis C.K. The Toronto premiere of this year’s Louis C.K. movie was a decidedly more subdued affair. The documentary Sorry/Not Sorry, which revisits the 2017 New York Times article that finally documented the long-circulating rumors about C.K.’s history of sexual misconduct, debuted to a mostly full house, but the setting was a modest auditorium at a multiplex late on a Sunday night, not a crammed 1,200-seat hall. Even in a low-key year for the festival, it was an underwhelming debut, retracing a story that many would evidently prefer to leave in the past.

Sorry/Not Sorry was produced by the Times’ documentary arm, and directors Caroline Suh and Cara Mones interview the writers of the original story as well as one of its sources, comedian Abby Schachner, who said that C.K. started masturbating during a 2003 phone call with her. (C.K. did not take part in the documentary or respond to the Times’ initial inquires, but after the article was published, he released a statement saying, “These stories are true.”) But the movie is strongest when it moves past the article’s publication in November 2017 and takes stock of its impact, on C.K., his victims, and those who tried to bring him to justice.

As the movie points out, C.K.’s history of sexual misconduct had been an open secret for years, especially within the comedy community. Comedian Jen Kirkman, who describes C.K. laying the groundwork to expose himself to her until a friend happened to walk in at precisely the right moment, discussed his history as a “known perv” in a quickly deciphered blind item on a podcast she released in 2015, and Megan Koester, also a subject of the documentary, told a joke onstage in which she lamented growing too old to have C.K. jerk off in front of her. The hints grew increasingly less subtle over the years: An episode of Tig Notaro’s C.K.-produced TV series One Mississippi released within a week of I Love You Daddy’s premiere featured a boss masturbating under his desk during a business meeting, with a female employee looking on in horror. But over those same years, C.K. was also growing to immense popularity and power, which left his victims feeling as if going public would be pointless at best, career-destroying at worst. Although the movie sticks to the idea that C.K.’s behavior was the result of a shameful compulsion, it’s not difficult to draw the inference that the lack of consent of his victims was, for him, a feature and not a bug. Even at the height of his fame, his victims were drawn from the ranks of fellow comedians rather than fans, seemingly because it would be more difficult to compel those whose professional futures didn’t depend on his good graces to keep quiet.

C.K. managed to hide in plain sight by adopting a façade of confessional honesty: One of his most celebrated routines was about how the greatest threat to women is men. Michael Schur, who cast him in a role on his sitcom Parks and Recreation, says he saw C.K. as “a misanthrope who loved people,” and comedian Michael Ian Black says “the heart of his act” was the admission that “I’m fucked up … and I’m trying to do the right thing.” But in retrospect, he was only telling people what he wanted them to know, coming clean about the parts of himself that would make people applaud his forthrightness rather than recoil in disgust. I Love You Daddy casts C.K. as a lifelong fan of a morally queasy art-house director who becomes horrified at the idea that his teenage daughter might become the director’s latest sexual conquest. But the movie also features a scene in which Charlie Day’s character mimes masturbation in front of a shell-shocked Edie Falco, which makes the whole thing feel like, as Times reporter Cara Buckley puts it, “an act of defiance.” Koester recalls being invited to an early screening, after the film had sold to a distributor for $5 million, and before its release was canceled because of the Times article. She emerged thinking, “He got away with it.”

He is still getting away with it. Although C.K., in the statement where he admitted the allegations against him were accurate, pledged to “step back and take a long time to listen,” he was doing drop-ins at the Comedy Cellar within a year, and releasing new stand-up specials by 2020. Outside a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden earlier this year, male fans rebuffed the idea that they should have any qualms about supporting him, although one does come clean in his own way: “Everyone has a certain amount of hypocrisy,” he admits, “and this is the amount I’ve allocated to myself.” Meanwhile, Koester was screamed at by the chief operating officer of the world’s largest comedy festival for asking performers what they thought of the allegations against C.K., and Kirkman, who had published two books and released two Netflix specials before the Times article was published, says that she was effectively unable to do any press for subsequent projects, because as soon as she said she wouldn’t talk about C.K., the interview requests were withdrawn.

After the screening, producer Kathleen Lingo was asked who, apart from C.K., declined to take part in the film, and the answer was as simple as it was stark: “Basically every single famous comedian we approached.” Even the people who spoke out against C.K. in 2017, Lingo said, were unwilling to do so again, which she attributed to the dwindling “sense of promise” as the #MeToo movement moved into the rearview mirror. She Said, a thoughtful and dramatic account of how the Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story, met with a tepid response at the box office last year, and Sorry/Not Sorry seems unlikely to emerge from Toronto with any notable buzz. Meanwhile, C.K., who, as Black points out, could have seized the opportunity to confront how one of the men who poses such a great threat to women is him, instead turned his behavior into a joke, characterizing it as the result of an awkward misunderstanding rather than a long-standing pattern. And now that C.K. is entirely self-sufficient—even for performances like the MSG gig, he rents out arenas himself rather than going through bookers—there’s no check on his behavior, as long as his fans continue to support him. As one observer in the documentary puts it, he’s “waving the banner for people who don’t care,” and plenty are willing to join the parade.