Stream It Or Skip It: ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ on HBO Max, a Powerful Documentary Portrait of Photographer Nan Goldin

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (now on HBO Max) chronicles the past and present of Nan Goldin, a revered photographer whose experience as an opioid addict turned her into a similarly revered anti-pharma activist. Her life is sublimely captured thanks to director Laura Poitras, who earned her third best feature-length documentary Oscar nomination for the film (she won for 2014’s Edward Snowden bio Citizenfour). Poitras seamlessly shifts between her own verite style and Nan’s slideshow monographs, mixing the photographer’s life story with her recent accomplishments, namely, landing some not-insignificant political punches against Purdue Pharma, whose aggressive sales and marketing of highly addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin showed a disgusting prioritization of profit over human lives. The result is a moving, sometimes searing film about a life lived with great pain and great purpose.

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: March 10, 2018: Nan Goldin and her colleagues gather their empty prescription bottles in tote bags and walk into New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. They enter the museum’s Sackler Wing and throw the prescription bottles into a pool of water in the Temple of Dendur exhibit, chanting, “Sacklers lie, thousands die!” Now we shift to images of slide projectors and carriages full of slides, Nan’s chosen medium to share her photography depicting moments of intimacy both shocking and banal, frequently featuring female and queer subjects. We see images not that Nan shot, but of her family during her childhood in the 1950s and ’60s. The Goldins lived in the quasi-halcyonic suburbs where Nan’s mother, perhaps best described as a long-troubled soul, took pains to repress any perceived dysfunction, a classic what-would-the-neighbors-think situation. We learn about Nan’s older sister Barbara, who was gay and therefore shuffled in and out of institutions as a teenager, before dying by suicide at age 18; she was a victim of, in Nan’s words, the “deadening grip of suburbia.”

We’ll get back to Nan’s biography – Poitras shifts easily between past and present, and now Nan shares the events of the recent past, when she was prescribed OxyContin after surgery. “I was addicted overnight,” she says. Acquiring and taking the drug consumed her life; simply swallowing the pills didn’t work quickly enough, so she was crushing and snorting them. Treatment and rehab helped Nan control her addiction, preventing her from becoming a statistic – opioid overdoses have accounted for hundreds of thousands of deaths. And here’s where the triumphs and tragedies of Nan’s life intersect: Many arts institutions that show her work are also endowed by the multibillionaire Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of OxyContin. The Sackler name adorns the Guggenheim, the Met, the Louvre and many other museums, which puts blood on the institutions’ hands by proxy; mountains of damning documents illustrate how the Sacklers relentlessly marketed and reaped billions from sales of the drug, turning a blind eye to how dangerously addictive it can be. 

So Nan formed the activist organization Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, or PAIN, who staged protests like the aforementioned at the Met. Their goal: Persuade arts institutions to stop accepting Sackler donations, and get them to remove the family’s name from many walls, signs and plaques. It came at significant personal risk on Nan’s part; she worried that her career would implode. But she’s used to such risk, having lived on the edge for decades of her life. She lived in foster homes as a teen and “made an art” out of rebellion; she suffered crippling introversion and didn’t speak for months until photography gave her an expressive outlet. In the 1970s, she fell in with outsider artists in the queer community in New York, photographing drag queens and underground soon-to-be icons like Cookie Mueller (who was among John Waters’ actor stable, and starred in films including Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos). Nan was a bartender and sex worker to fund her photographic endeavors, which documented her life amidst the No Wave movement, pockmarked with violence and addiction, with great expressiveness and vulnerability. Of course, the art world would take notice, and her career would eventually give her a platform for a potent social countermovement that would hit the Sacklers where it hurts. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Memorable films about photographers: Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Errol Morris’ documentary The B-Side. Now cross that aesthetic with Alex Gibney’s two-part HBO documentary takedown of Purdue Pharma, The Crime of the Century. 

Performance Worth Watching: Nan is a compelling figure on screen, but an even stronger narrator, sounding refined but never over- or under-rehearsed as she shares her story atop many still photographs from her life.  

Memorable Dialogue: Nan: “My anger at the Sackler family – it’s personal. I hate these people. But it’s not about my own addiction. When you think of the profit off peoples’ pain, you can only be furious about it.”

Sex and Skin: Many of Nan’s still photographs feature graphic nudity.

Our Take: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is diligent, rigorous and thorough, typical of Poitras’ work. But her journalistic style is funneled through Nan’s point of view – the director and her subject’s art function on opposite sides of the verite coin, and the film is as poignant and deeply moving as it is informative. And, crucially, Poitras is uninterested in any other perspective. Nan’s story is brutally honest and endowed with passion, and to indulge any mouthpiece for the amoral capitalist monolith that is Purdue Pharma would disrupt the film’s truth and clarity, and compromise it beyond repair. 

The film is a powerful op-ed for the underrepresented, with a charismatic nucleus in Nan, whose explorations of sexuality and addiction, the images of the underground, are raw and revelatory. The tension between that rawness, reflected in the documentary’s biographical components, and the pointed and deliberate goals of Nan’s activism, offers a fascinating tonal dichotomy that feels like a logical next step of her career. Nan’s work actively destigmatizes addiction, sex work, mental illness and LGBTQ lives, and her attempts to oust the unconscionable endowments of the Stackler family from the art world is a heroic act of rebellion. That narrative renders the film an advocate for openness – “The wrong things are kept secret, and that destroys people,” Nan says – and emotional vulnerability that fosters love and empathy. The manner in which Poitras structures and presents the many layers of Nan’s story is simply extraordinary, a portrait of advocacy like no other.  

Our Call: STREAM IT. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a must-see documentary.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.