Steve Gleason is an American NFL player from New Orleans who began to document his life on video in 2011, at the age of 34, when he was diagnosed with ALS, the degenerative motor neurone disease famously affecting the physicist Stephen Hawking. At the same time, Gleason found out that he was going to be a father. The resulting film is a moving testament to the courage shown by Gleason and his formidable wife, Michel, as she prepared to have the baby.
But the film is at its most powerful – and in a way most unbearable – in documenting the relationship between Steve and his troubled dad Mike, a fundamentalist Christian who in the early stage of Steve’s condition believed that his son would be miraculously cured if only he could accept a pure Christian faith. The scene when Steve is persuaded to go to a faith-healing service is almost unwatchably horrible, and the emotional and painful confrontations between these two men are the most intense part of the film. Their relationship is not entirely resolved, I suspect, even at the very end of the film when Mike is interviewed by Steve and jokingly calls him “tough guy”. Steve Gleason is still alive, nearing his 40th birthday.
