If you’re only going to watch one documentary this year, please let it be this one. Incredibly heartfelt, honest and funny, Josh Greenbaum’s Will & Harper on Netflix puts friendship at the centre of a road trip journey for Will Ferrell and former Saturday Night Live (SNL) head writer Harper Steele.
At the age of 61, Steele sent an email to her friends, including Ferrell, coming out as a trans woman. While Ferrell was quick to respond by expressing his love and support, as he says in the documentary, he had a lot of questions for Steele. And she had many for him.
Throughout Steele’s life, she’s driven and hitchhiked all over the U.S. Knowing this, Ferrell posed the idea of doing one of these cross-country road trips together.
“I love [America] so much,” Steele says in Will & Harper. “I just don’t know if it loves me back right now.”
Driving from New York to California, we go on this road trip with the frequent collaborators as they open up to each other like they never have before.
While much of the film is about this friendship between Ferrell and Steele, it also allows Steele to experience driving across the U.S. and going to smaller towns as a trans woman, expressing to her friends and family before a trip that safety is more of a concern for her.
From a basketball game in Indianapolis, to karaoke in Peoria, Illinois, a stock car race in Oklahoma and a steakhouse in Amarillo, Texas, it’s a rich adventure for these two friends.
The friendship between Ferrell and Steele is at the heart of this story, with the audience quickly immersed in the flow of their dynamic, oftentimes starting with a joke. But they also get quite emotional and vulnerable with each other.
You can tell they’re incredibly synched comedically and it’s really a gift to spend so much time with two people who very much speak the same comedy language.
Even if you’ve been a longtime fan of Ferrell, Will & Harper shows a more earnest side to him than many associate with the star. There’s beauty in the way the documentary shows Ferrell really just listening to Steele, trying to be an ally, and each of them getting to an evolved place of friendship with each other.
Of course, Ferrell’s fame plays a significant role in this story. In some aspects Steele communicates that it makes her feel more comfortable having him by her side, our waiting outside a bar for her. But other times the attention around them felt very different.
When they walk into a Texas steakhouse and Ferrell is in a Sherlock Holmes costume, set to participate in a steak-eating contest, they draw significant attention. In this case, it led to several transphobic comments posted online about their visit. But Will & Harper also shows Ferrell breaking down, saying that he feels like he let his friend down in that moment. It’s a raw depiction of Ferrell navigating allyship and what that should look like, with his love for Steele as his guiding light.
On Harper’s end, she opens up to Ferrell about the her experience coming out as a trans women in her 60s, from the pain to the joy as she experiences the world as her authentic self.
Of course, travelling across the U.S. with Ferrell and a camera crew is far from a “normal” experience, but in Will & Harper it’s the honesty and love we see on screen, both from Ferrell and Steele, that makes this documentary particularly impactful. It’s a story of hope, compassion and understanding that certainly needs to be seen and shared.
