Anyone who has ever navigated the thorny labyrinth of the American healthcare system (and many who haven’t) has likely wondered what it would be like to devote seemingly unlimited resources and time not only to the diagnostic complications of disease, but also to preventative self-care. The Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever answers that question, though it falls flat in other ways.
Directed by Chris Smith, the film centers on Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who has made it his life’s mission to tackle the vexing biology of aging. More a gentle curiosity than a forceful social exploration, the result is entertaining if shallow: a film whose flaws are neither technical nor creative, but rather a function of framing and philosophical engagement.
Director: Chris SmithStars: Mac Davis, Bryan Johnson
As founder and CEO of Braintree, Johnson made his money in mobile and web payment systems before selling his company to PayPal in 2013. Since then, he has practiced venture capital investing while seemingly devoting the overwhelming amount of his energy to, well, just living longer.
The vehicle for his unanimous obsession is a radical, highly disciplined personal anti-aging program he has dubbed “Project Blueprint.” Its goal is to slow the rate at which Johnson ages and, theoretically, perhaps even reverse most of the functional declines that accompany old age around the world. With a vast and developed infrastructure, this includes everything from diet, exercise, and hundreds of pills per day to more innovative and experimental treatments.
While the first 15 minutes of Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever offer a dizzying amount of wordy detail (hello, inhaled pulmonary senolytics and shockwave therapy for the penis!) in the same way that businessmen use particular jargon to make themselves look smart, those who dread an advanced biology lesson need not fear. Don’t Die isn’t really a complicated exercise, and generally steers clear of much of the specific science of Johnson’s regimen.
Instead, the film introduces Johnson’s teenage son, Talmage, who has reconnected with his father after a divorce. From there, it focuses on various aspects of both Blueprint and its protagonist’s life, including Johnson making all of his health data public, the leveraging of that open-book documentation for business purposes (“It’s not science, it’s just attention,” one doctor says dismissively), intergenerational plasma therapy, and more.
Smith first gained attention with his 1996 debut, American Job, a sharp mockumentary that looked at the hardships of life on a minimum wage. But he really made a splash with the 1999 indie hit, American Movie, which cast a sympathetic eye at an eccentric aspiring filmmaker from Wisconsin. Smith has had a varied career that, in recent years, has seen him follow the money trail into the nonfiction realm, directing high-profile, multi-episode nonfiction projects for Netflix, Apple TV+, and Max.
While Smith’s early work seemed to herald the arrival of a talented, unconventional new chronicler with a unique insight into the struggles of blue-collar workers, much of his later work (Fyre, Branson, Mr. McMahon) instead focuses on the lives and problems of the ultra-rich (and, indeed, those who often create them), and in this sense, Don’t Die fits comfortably into Smith’s filmography.
Though it lacks the crucial similarity of a criminal element, Don’t Die actually has quite a bit in common with Bad Vegan, Smith’s four-part film, which chronicles the strange downfall of Sarma Melngailis, a vegan New Yorker, restaurant owner and aspiring influencer. In a macro sense, both projects are stories of fundamentally unhappy and deeply ambivalent people searching for someone or something to give their lives a greater purpose.
While Bad Vegan never quite managed to overcome Melngailis’s level-headed emotional detachment, Don’t Die actually does an admirable job of fully humanizing Johnson. In a world where billionaires are frequently portrayed as clueless and socially unstructured, Johnson (a mere billionaire 400 times his size) is refreshingly self-aware. He speaks openly about his past struggles with mental health and has a pleasant, unassuming demeanor, even going so far as to admit, jokingly or not, that “This is a cult, so you go to bed earlier.”
But the film remains, like Bad Vegan, a mix of captivating and frustrating parts. This is largely because Smith doesn’t seem to realize the whole point.
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