A documentary about a dude who didn’t go for a colonoscopy, André Is an Idiot is a cautionary tale about André Ricciardi, a wild man of advertising who, instead of having a small amount of discomfort during an exploratory procedure when it was offered, stayed at home and wound up with terminal cancer.
Ricciardi kicks off by telling us a story about masturbating as a teenager and getting a splinter in his penis. It’s got nothing really to do with the cancer but it does mark André out as someone who knows how to grab an audience’s attention.
Sell the sizzle not the sausage – it’s probably not the entirely appropriate time to wheel out that old advertising adage, but that’s what André is doing with the splinter story. There are plenty of woe-is-me tales about people with cancer out there. André is determined to give us something different. So we also get the story about why he has a pair of Kim Kardashian’s leather pants in his house. And the even odder one about how he met his wife – marrying a random waitress so she could get a green card and then falling in love with her.
Honesty is the other commodity on offer. “How mundane my own death is,” he muses to camera, “How routine it feels.” This only eight weeks after the initial diagnosis. He wonders how he got “anal cancer”, as he disarmingly calls colorectal cancer, ranging back over a life in a high pressure industry where drugs and alcohol were useful standbys. Maybe it was rat poison, smoking, DDT residues in the environment. He has his genome decoded so he can be cloned in the future, he jokes, possibly half-seriously.
“It fascinating that I’m dying… and I want to learn from it,” André says at one point. He tempers the earnestness with irreverence. Watching it I was reminded of another rock’n’roll maverick, Anthony Bourdain.
We get the stuff you get in cancer movies – chemotherapy, the support of friends and family, settling scores with the past. André goes on a road trip with his friend Lee and they take mushrooms together. He meets up with his older brother Nick. He leans increasingly on wife Janice and tries to spare his daughters, Tallula and Delilah, the grimmest details.
Eventually, after 50 rounds of it, the chemo stops working and André is moved on to radiotherapy.
Tommy Chong turns up, playing André’s father, who declined to appear – the only person who wouldn’t. Smoking a bong, “dad” and André chat in a small scene that serves little obvious purpose, though it does reveal that Tommy also had colorectal cancer and survived it.
The film is directed by Tony Benna, an advertising director and longtime buddy/colleague of Ricciardi. He keeps it light and pacey, injecting little stop-motion animations here and there of André in various situations and guises – scenes from a life.
André, too, keeps it light, at one point telling his therapist that he’s got a great idea for a TV show in which people compete to kill him in the most novel and entertaining way. Peter laughs out loud in a way that makes you realise therapists treating dying people probably don’t get to laugh that much.
In the end, well in the end we all die, don’t we? André starts to look ghastly – teeth too big for his head, skin yellow and tightening. The “it cannot be long now” stage.
It’s a heroic film, turning a personal tragedy into something useful, but it also serves to keep André’s focus off himself. “Get Your Fucking Colonoscopy”, it ends, a big message on screen. André Ricciardi, an advertising guy right to the very end.
André Is an Idiot – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
