'Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!' review: Judd Apatow's loving, insightful portait of the 'last man standing'

WHAT IT'S ABOUT This documentary portrait of the life and times of Mel Brooks, a man who needs no introduction, arrives on HBO Max courtesy of Judd Apatow, one of the many comedic talents who owe their careers in no small part to the trail Brooks blazed.

"Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!" tells the icon's story over the course of two parts, in a project that also serves as a kind of dissertation on the history of American comedy.

It begins with his childhood in Brooklyn, transitions through his first taste of show business in the Catskills' Borscht Belt, his World War II service, his work on "Your Show of Shows" for Sid Caesar, "The 2,000 Year Old Man" and Brooks' decades-long close partnership with Carl Reiner, his rise to the pinnacle of Hollywood after the 1974 one-two punch of "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein," and a whole lot more, straight to the present day.

Brooks' relationship with his children, his marriage to Anne Bancroft, his still lesser-understood work executive producing serious movies like "The Elephant Man" and "The Fly": It's all here. Through contemporary interviews and period footage, multiple generations of the biggest stars in the business tell us about what Brooks meant to them

Syosset-raised Apatow ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin") co-directs the picture with Michael Bonfiglio.

MY SAY In one sense, this is the documentary equivalent of an easy basketball layup. There's not a more universally beloved person in show business than Brooks. Just thinking about some of the classic moments in his movies — and there are too many to mention — puts an immediate smile on your face. You've got a built-in audience here just by virtue of getting Brooks to sit down and talk.

The test for the picture, then, comes in whether it's possible to emerge from it with any new insight into the man himself and into why his work resonates as much as it does. And the filmmakers find plenty of material on both fronts.

It's important to recognize that Brooks is, as the title says, 99 years old. Bancroft has been gone for more than 20 years. Virtually all of his peers and friends have died. There's an inherent loneliness to being the last man standing that the picture taps into thoughtfully, both in the contemporary interview Apatow conducts with Brooks and in the directorial choices he makes with Bonfiglio. Having the camera trained on Brooks' face as he rewatches the scene in "Silent Movie" where he dances with Bancroft, for example, says a lot about what it means to experience profound loss and to somehow persevere through it.

At the same time, the picture gets at something meaningful in its exploration of how Brooks used his humor in a radical and transformative sense, to highlight the profound absurdity that underpins so much of modern existence. He's done this better than anyone for decades. And, as the picture finally and hopefully suggests, and the upcoming "Spaceballs 2" confirms, he's still doing it today.

BOTTOM LINE Mel Brooks gets the biographical documentary treatment he deserves.