AllMovie

An embodiment of empty celebrity status, pop icon Andy Warhol's impenetrable façade never comes down in Chuck Workman's documentary Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol. With his blank stare and dull responses, Warhol maintains his image, staying perpetually on the surface without directly disclosing anything about himself or his work. Friends in the art world, family in rural Pennsylvania, and, mostly, just acquaintances, all reveal how little they knew of who he really was. Yet the broad vista of interview subjects wax on about how deeply their lives were touched and how the pop-culture landscape was forever changed by the presence of this vacuous man. While understandably lacking in-depth interviews with the man himself, the film more than makes up for it with Workman's skilled editing. He layers the rapid-media messages with paradoxical interviews to create a meditation on celebrity and the spirit of the time, rather than an exploration of a person. What the film becomes is less a biographical documentary and more a collage of major media images and their relation to assembly-line commercial advertising. For such a vapid subject as Warhol, the task of deepening an understanding of him is a difficult one, because he has built a career around withholding information about himself. What Superstar does reveal is how the major figures around him were changed by the cultural phenomenon, not by the person.