The One and Only Dick Gregory

The first-rate doc, written and directed by Andre Gaines, is a reminder to anyone familiar with Gregory of the breadth and prescience of his work; to the uninitiated, it will be an eye-opener.

The One and Only Dick Gregory is a comprehensive biography of a mercurial, brilliant and wildly funny artist-activist.

The uncanny confidence of Dick Gregory comes through from the opening minutes of The One and Only Dick Gregory, and he only becomes more formidable as the film unfolds.

The One and Only Dick Gregory highlights Gregory's particular knack for getting people to laugh with him, and more significantly, the sacrifices he made in pursuit of greater objectives than the roar of a crowd and that nightly paycheck.

Mr. Gaines occasionally loses confidence in his audience—the parallels that can be drawn between Gregory’s times and now are pretty obvious and don’t really need the punctuation. Most of the time, though, The One and Only Dick Gregory is a memorable portrait, of someone whose story deserves to be better remembered.

By covering so much ground, it doesn’t have room to dig too deep. But along with some very funny footage of a master of his craft, it offers a convincing argument that while Gregory became famous for his comedy, what made him such a riveting cultural figure is what he did after he left it behind.

The film’s title is apt: Gregory was one of a kind. But despite the film’s argument that its subject’s activism was part and parcel of his comedy, and not an afterthought, it’s the jokes that are given short shrift here. One wishes there might have been room for a few more of them.