59-year-old Bill Friedman is a glistening piece of man-meat, but he’s also a total dick

Bodybuilding is hideous and unnerving — freakishly sculpted men and women transform themselves into slick monsters to earn trophies (and maybe do ads for protein supplements). Yet, it’s undeniably compelling to see the human body in such aberrant form, taking fitness to its most steroidal of conclusions.

Bryan Friedman’s debut documentary The Bodybuilder and I is more “dear diary” than exposé, but oddly absorbing in its portrayal of aging men transforming themselves into glistening, pounded steaks (often sans genitals from steroid use). The doc follows Friedman’s dad, 59-year-old Bill, as he prepares for a bodybuilding competition in Florida. Friedman says he needed to make the documentary as a way of coming to terms with Bill’s status as a deadbeat dad. So, you get lots of sad-sack narration and the requisite on-screen crying. However, you also get to see Bill — who is a total prick, by the way — in his glory, as he mocks his geriatric competitors and generally just acts like a douche bag.

Maybe it’s the extra testosterone swishing around his brain, but Bill epitomizes male identity gone awry. He’s like some objectivist hero cultivating a pet project between lawyer duty and making his wife shave his back. So if you’re looking for an exposé on the world of bodybuilding, this isn’t it. Instead, it’s more an exploration of an estranged son bewildered by his father’s cultish obsession.

Friedman’s introspective journey isn’t very compelling, and the interviews and footage of his father are used mainly to show how much of a dick he is. Correction: watching Bill berate everyone he meets is very compelling. That said, there’s a lot to recommend in The Bodybuilder and I. Friedman interviews a few of Bill’s wacky opponents, the most surreal of them an alopecia-addled freak who poses in front of a giant mirror while listening to Celiné Dion. One guy (who looks like Mel Brooks’s character Yogurt from Spaceballs) gets a huge, boyish grin when he recalls the women who swoon over him at the competitions, to the dismay of his squeamishly uncomfortable wife. The strange footage from the competition, where all of the bodybuilders acquire a similar look of huge, golden-muscled fetuses posing to “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” before dazed Floridians, is worth the price of admission alone.