Cancer sucks. No debate there. Unless you’re miraculously lucky with timing and have lots of money to spend on effective treatment, no matter what stage you get it or what form you’re diagnosed with, cancer has you by the gut as soon as it’s there. Just ask André Ricciardi, the self-proclaimed dummy, whose refusal to get a colonoscopy at 50 ends in a late-stage colon cancer diagnosis a year later, and decides to make a movie about it. In André Is an Idiot, Ricciardi spends an hour and a half laughing through morbid topics of mortality, the end, family, friendship, life’s meaning, work, purpose, and more in what may prove to be one of 2026’s most intimate, funny, and touchingly tearful documentaries. May we all live as vivaciously carefree as André Ricciardi until the end.

With or without colon tumors, Ricciardi is… a unique character, to say the least. Never one to miss a comedic beat or strange idea, the man seems to run entirely on impulse and laughs. We first meet a plumply healthy Ricciardi sitting down and clapping the director’s clapboard. He immediately tells us about the time his penis got filled with splinters in his early teenage years, for no reason but naive curiosity for different textures. Eyes and lips widened in an almost relieved giddiness, Ricciardi’s personality sharpens instantly—and it never fades as he laughs with the audience over every story, idea, and current predicament he pokes fun at. In other words, André comes off as the kinda guy you might want to have around, not for sop or heart-to-hearts, but to grab a beer, chat up a storm, and do some really funky shit no matter the circumstance or initial mood. Who wouldn’t want to hang with a guy who decides, now looking shaggy in his overgrown beard and anemic in his cancer-ridden thinness, to try and get his head transplanted onto another body in Italy on a whim? He’s eccentric and always trying to make people laugh. What’s not to like?

That spontaneity drives everything in André’s life, for better or worse. Having spent some 20 years in the advertising industry, Ricciardi’s spontaneous jokesterism spurred him to create off-kilter, untraditionally raw, ironic ads for a variety of entities and people, from Ozzy Osbourne to Pepsi. That work and the connections gained from his hundreds of ads, despite “advertising [feeling] so fucking pointless once you get cancer,” gave him the very means necessary to make this grand goodbye movie– again, “only André’s way.” His lifelong marriage to his wife, Janice, is initially even an impulsive sham; working as André’s bartender earlier in their lives, she approached André’s gay friend requesting an American green card-producing lavender marriage, to which André instead jumped on board. While they do eventually fall for each other and have two kids, they spend their initial years scamming a romance gameshow for shits and giggles, and to win a vacation that they “still had to fucking pay taxes on.” André’s lack of forethought, planning, or worry puts him in these extravagant situations and directs his whole life, making cancer’s late-stage appearance all the more ugly.

As time progresses and his disease worsens, André never wavers in front of his family, believing “if I can’t make [my daughters] laugh anymore, then it’s over. I don’t see a point anymore.” If it isn’t already clear, André’s not just doing this to look resilient; as he himself says time and again, this time gazing at stars and wondering about the nothingness of death, “it’s hard [for me] to face fear,” anxiety, and negativity …. I usually revert to my old tricks, but I struggle with that fear.” Such fear and trepidation, despite André’s attempts at avoidance, drive everyone in the film. At different points, everyone sits anxiously awaiting the next cancer update; André’s kids fear for what life will look like with their dad gone; Janice worries about the shift in dynamics, especially as she finds her strengths in dealing with the “panic of the here and now…. But I struggle with how to deal with it in the longer term. I can’t just step in and fix everything”; André, though unafraid of dying, fears “for all the people I’m leaving behind.” Cancer and dying are always terrifying, and seeing people contend with that in sharply edited, partially stop-motion, and usually laugh-out-loud scenes alone makes André Is an Idiot an emotionally powerful movie.

What André struggles to contend with at first is that some fear and anxiety are okay—and perhaps necessary—to live with. They are emotions just like all others, and deserve to be sat with and allowed to be felt either simultaneously or in reflective moments. Jokes aren’t bad when it comes to maintaining one’s sense of self, dignity, and joy in times of pain, loss, and grieving, but André’s was a lifelong avoidant tactic. If generously timely, death usually shows people the flaws in their coping skills, and it does for André; while his becoming “solemn and serious” and exuding an “openness” unlike André feels “out of character” for Janice, their kids, André’s brother Nick, and others, he eventually lets those other emotions out without shirking his sense of humor. Even when ill, his breaths seem to deepen, and his shoulders relax; from then on, continuing to flip off the camera, the USA, and anyone else listening, perhaps André finally felt more at peace with the emotional range all humans experience—allowing himself, his family, and even us viewers to grieve his passing. That emotional growth is a vital component of life, though it’s scarcely discussed and a point André learned perhaps a little too late.

André didn’t want anyone to grieve his passing, though, as much as his therapist instructs him to understand that grieving is important. He wanted his family, friends, and us as viewers, to understand the beauties of the life he experienced, breathing with the tragedy and lows of it all as much as the highs—and to “GET YOUR FUCKING COLONOSCOPY,” as bold white letters remind us at Idiot’s end. Death comes one way or another, and it’s always ugly, so why not spend every minute laughing off the fear until it’s time to scream “So long, suckers?” Because to live is to “sit with fear,” to hang on with the hurt, and heal beyond it through consistent acknowledgement and work, as André eventually learns. André Is an Idiot is not just a well-executed goodbye to a kindhearted, amusingly cartoonish father, husband, and person—which was done exactly “his way,” as his brother Nick reminds throughout—but a granular, artful observation of how fatal disease and death affect a person and their loved ones. Unlike so many documentaries about individual subjects, love gushes from the stars’ laughable and heartfelt reminiscences and from the film’s varied techniques (which also keep Idiot fresh and entertaining). For documentary lovers, intimate film enthusiasts, advertising nerds, and those looking for an upbeat but grounded “fuck you, cancer,” André Is an Idiot is an insightful, somber, timely, and perspective-changing pick. Rest in peace, André Ricciardi. May you never need a colonoscopy or a hospital visit again.

In theaters Friday, 3/20 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre and Thursday, 3/26 @ Alamo Drafthouse Seaport