Steve Martin’s Lesson in Following Your Own Muse

For Vulture this week, Grierson and I ranked every Steve Martin movie. We actually wrote the piece several years ago but it never ended up running, for mundane scheduling reasons, with the understanding that whenever the next Steve Martin movie came out, we’d publish it then. And then the next Steve Martin movie just never happened: He hasn’t appeared in a film since the 2016 Ang Lee film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. We finally got our excuse with the release this weekend of the excellent two-part documentary STEVE! (Martin) on Apple TV.

As we noted in our intro to the piece, and as the documentary makes vividly clear, limiting Martin to just “movie actor” does him a tremendous disservice. To quote ourselves: “Plenty of aspiring artists spend their whole lives trying to perfect one discipline. Steve Martin has, arguably, conquered at least six.” Martin studied philosophy in college, started out as a magician, transformed himself into the biggest stand-up comedian on the planet, pivoted into becoming a legitimate movie star, wrote several best-selling novels and hit musicals (as well as multiple screenplays, including the ones to many of his biggest and best movies), was probably the best Oscar host we’ve ever had and has produced six albums of music with his bluegrass band the Steep Canyon Rangers. (He also married his New Yorker fact-checker, which might…