‘André Is an Idiot’ Review: Get a F**king Colonoscopy!

Ad exec André Ricciardi wasn’t just the kind of guy who decided to make a comedic documentary about his terminal cancer diagnosis, he was also the type of guy who decided to open that documentary — titled “André Is an Idiot” — by looking directly into the camera and recounting a particular memory from when he was 13 years old: The night he masturbated by rubbing the head of his penis against a panel of exposed wood in the bathroom of his grandparents’ house. He calls it the second-biggest mistake he would ever make in his entire life. 

The first was failing to get a colonoscopy when he turned 45. Or even when he was 50, and his best friend Lee suggested they both get their innards scoped out together as part of a boys night out. By the time Ricciardi finally volunteered himself for the procedure two years later (concerned about the blood that kept dribbling out of his ass), the polyps that a doctor might have found during an earlier examination had grown into a fist-sized mass and metastasized throughout his liver. The first thing his mother said when he told her the grim news: “What a fucking idiot.” 

And sure, I suppose you might feel pretty stupid about dying from an eminently preventable cancer after skipping multiple opportunities to let doctors to nip it in the butt (so to speak), but we’re all mere rookies here on Earth, and even the luckiest among us will live just long enough to learn what they might have done differently the second time around. While Ricciardi delighted in doing very dumb things (like buying a pair of Kim Kardashian’s pants at auction in the hopes of scraping the pleather for DNA that might be used to clone her someday), the fact of the matter is that he was a brilliant guy, and fully alive until the minute he was no longer alive at all. 

Conceived at its subject’s insistence and shot with his total participation, the liltingly poignant and lightly piercing documentary that Tony Benna has made about him celebrates its namesake for his genius and his stupidity alike, the non-judgmental irreverence of its approach introducing us to a man so vital that we refuse to believe he dies at the end. It isn’t a “spoiler” to say that Ricciardi eventually succumbed to the cancer everyone knew would kill him, but it’s a testament to the sheer exuberance of his life force that it almost feels like one. 

More to the point, that cognitive dissonance appears to be the ultimate pursuit of Benna’s film, which fondly eulogizes Ricciardi’s life in the interest of making a feature-length PSA out of his death. It’s one thing to chuckle at a clever ad campaign reminding you to get a colonoscopy, it’s another to spend 88 minutes watching a fun-loving father waste away before our eyes because he neglected to do that. “André Is an Idiot” is a much lighter experience than its logline might suggest, but its buoyancy in the face of oblivion is the source of its power: If this guy was cheated out of another few decades on this planet, how dare we — who make so much less of every moment — just sit on our asses instead of getting them probed? 

It’s a simple but affecting message presented in simple but affecting terms. Aside from some diorama-like animation — to help keep things from getting too heavy — and a smattering of subliminal recreations, Benna mostly just lets Ricciardi and his loved ones do the talking. “André” himself was a natural storyteller, so excitedly curious about our world, and it’s a blast just to listen to him recount his life story with the locked-in enthusiasm of a person who managed to find some wide-eyed joy in every chapter. (His energy and affect reminded me so much of Jason Lee… I wonder if anyone ever told him that.) 

Such flair came naturally to someone who embraced the possibilities of being alive. Case in point: When Ricciardi overheard that the bartender at his local watering hole was looking for a green card marriage, he volunteered on the spot. André had a girlfriend and Janice had a boyfriend and everyone was cool with the arrangement — they even managed to fake their way to victory on an episode of “The Newlywed Game.” Of course, studying up on each other proved seductive, the two of them soon fell in love, and they remained happily married until Ricciardi’s death. 

Someone as eccentric and self-possessed as Ricciardi might seem like a weird fit for the strictures of the advertising world, but his left-of-center sensibilities are exactly why he was so good at his job, and the glimpses we see of him in that arena suggest a soft-hearted evolution of the hippie who Don Draper threatened to become at the end of “Mad Men.” Ricciardi knew how to sell the masses on corporate America in a way that made people feel like they were part of the counterculture (his reel includes a memorable campaign for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”), often because they reflected the sort of radical honesty that marketing typically exists to obscure. 

That honesty is as implicit to his screen presence as it was to his living persona, and the most engaging stretches of “André Is an Idiot” explore the disconnect between the bring-it-on transparency with which Ricciardi discusses the reality of his death, and the reluctance with which he discusses the abstract feelings that come with it. Pain. Fear. The heartbreaking of leaving his loved ones behind. Ricciardi happily jabbers on about his kids, but he refuses to share certain details with them about his illness. His love is undeniable, but his affection is only expressed tacitly — he doesn’t even hug his daughter when she goes off to college. 

That wasn’t his way, but it’s also true that some things hurt too much to confront head-on. Benna’s camera is invited to observe the physical reality of Ricciardi’s body, even as it swells and shrinks towards the end; the fact of what’s happening is never in doubt, but processing it emotionally proves almost impossible. The anus is so much easier to treat than the heart, which is all the more reason why people should get a fucking colonoscopy. 

And that’s all Ricciardi is really trying to say here. “André Is an Idiot” eventually swerves into a subplot about the colon-screening campaign that its subject helped to spearhead in his final months, but make no mistake: The film itself is the magnum opus of Ricciardi’s marketing career. As a piece of cinema, it would be easy to criticize Benna’s doc for being modest, twee, and overly indebted to the emotional grammar of the staid TV commercials that Ricciardi sought to reinvent. It would be easy to deduct points for its lack of focus, and for the handful of swings that only serve to underscore where the movie falls short on the basics (a celebrity drops in for a last-minute cameo as Ricciardi’s late father, but the happy surprise of it all is muted by our lack of investment in that relationship). A less effective film might would have made it easy to question its epigraph, an André-ism that doesn’t seem to have any real bearing on the tender portrait that Benna has just painted of him. 

But I doubt Ricciardi would have cared about any of that, just as he wouldn’t have been especially thrilled to learn that Dan Deacon’s poppy electronic score keeps things bouncing along, or that the AI voice that reads his final journal entry — presumably with Ricciardi’s permission — does an uncanny job of capturing his spirit. I think the only thing Ricciardi would have cared about is that the love he had for his family comes through loud and clear, and that the documentary Benna made about his life is such an effective PSA about the importance of letting people stick a camera up your butt that I barely made it 15 minutes into the film before I paused my screener and started googling the best way to schedule a colonoscopy. Most of us could never hope to be as smart as Ricciardi was, but the movie he’s left behind does everything in its power to ensure that we’re not as dumb as he was either. 

Grade: B

“André Is an Idiot” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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