After sixteen years of coaxing revelations from everyone from President Barack Obama to Robin Williams and turning self-doubt and darkness into connection, Marc Maron (Joker) has made vulnerability his brand. Now, as his WTF podcast prepares for its final episode this October, director Steven Feinartz turns the camera on Maron himself in Are We Good?, capturing the 61-year-old comedian grappling with the most devastating loss of his life: the sudden 2020 death of his partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton.

This is not a comedy doc or a victory lap, and it never pretends to be. Are We Good? is a lesson on grief, creative purpose, and how a man never known for optimism manages to get out of bed when everything familiar has disappeared.  How to live with an unfixable break.

The documentary follows Maron during the pandemic’s isolation as he processes Shelton’s death from acute myeloid leukemia, a rare blood disease that took her with shocking speed. Feinartz weaves together archival footage spanning Maron’s comedy career from his early days with shock comedian Sam Kinison through decades of struggle, interspersed with present-day moments as Maron builds new stand-up material while visiting his declining father. This is not a pandemic story in the typical sense, though lockdown’s isolation infiltrates every frame. We meet Maron not at the funeral, but in the long, heavy silence that follows.

Feinartz, who previously directed Maron’s HBO special From Bleak to Dark and his most recent, Panicked, brings an observational approach influenced by documentaries like Crumb and Grey Gardens. Shooting mostly solo over three and a half years, he captures Maron in his Highland Park home—surrounded by guitars and rescue cats, bristling at Feinartz and visibly annoyed by the camera yet allowing access anyway. This reluctant transparency becomes the film’s greatest strength. We see Maron at his most unguarded, pausing mid-thought as grief ambushes him, his neurotic defensiveness momentarily dropping to reveal something softer underneath.

There’s no soft lighting, no slick transitions. Just Maron, his cats, his grief, and his relentless need to keep creating even when it feels meaningless. The opening fifteen minutes establish what made Maron and Shelton work: her sunny optimism was the perfect counterweight to his decades of cynicism. Their 2015 podcast interview sparks with genuine connection that longtime listeners recognized at the time, a meet-cute that makes her absence unbearable.

The editing—by Derek Boonstra, Natalie Ancona, and Jenn Harper—deserves mention for finding rhythm without redundancy. Instagram Live footage from lockdown creates an unusually intimate portrait, with Maron essentially holding his own camera. Podcast excerpts featuring conversations about loss with other celebrities like Patton Oswalt (Chain Reactions) and Andrew Garfield (tick, tick… BOOM!) prove genuine and moving. Stark audio waveforms become visual representations of Maron’s sorrow itself. Less successful are crude animation interludes that feel like hasty gap-fillers—a criticism Maron himself amusingly voices within the film. But even the seams fit the film’s honesty.

If you’ve followed Maron, much of the biography is familiar: addiction, divorce, late-arriving fame. The newness is in tone. The barbs remain, but now they sit longer before swinging. Fellow comics John Mulaney (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse), Nate Bargatze, David Cross (Oh Hi!), and Michaela Watkins (Suze) appear throughout, offering perspectives on their prickly, beloved colleague. But their testimonials, while affectionate, pale beside the unguarded moments with Maron’s father, who’s living with dementia. There’s tenderness there that Maron tries to shrug off but can’t fully suppress.

Some have questioned whether Maron’s grief seems disproportionate to a relationship still in its honeymoon phase. But grief doesn’t calculate that way. We don’t mourn only the years we had but the ones we were counting on. Watching Maron fold Shelton into his act—his delivery still acerbic but now shot through with genuine tenderness—reveals something essential about creative survival. He’s not performing grief for effect. He’s literally figuring out how to keep breathing.

The timing makes Are We Good? more than just a celebrity profile. Maron lost Shelton when support systems vanished, forced to mourn in isolation during a global crisis that had nothing to do with his personal tragedy. His struggle speaks to a broader cultural wound: our discomfort with vulnerability, our tendency to read emotional honesty as weakness rather than a deeply human strength.

As Maron prepares to end WTF, this documentary arrives at the perfect moment. For years, he’s been the confessor, creating space for others to examine their lives. Now, finally, he’s giving back what he’s been so skilled at extracting—offering the same raw honesty he’s demanded from fifteen hundred guests. The film’s title, borrowed from his sign-off question, hangs in the air unanswered. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re never quite good. Maybe we’re just stumbling forward, trying to turn our pain into connection, our silence into something worth saying.

There’s no clean catharsis here. Just the ongoing, exhausting work of being honest. For longtime Maron devotees, Are We Good? feels like the next chapter—one he didn’t necessarily want to write, but did anyway. Not for closure, but for connection. Are we good? Not yet. But we’re talking, which in Maron’s universe is how healing starts.