The world travels of a pair of brothers, one with Down’s, start to look like a middling gap-year projectOn the rare occasions the cinema has engaged with Down’s syndrome – 1996’s The Eighth Day and 2019’s The Peanut Butter Falcon are the main ones to spring to mind – it’s been in the form of sweetly sentimental road trips.
Though Handsome travels far wider, this meandering, naggingly superficial and sometimes outright misjudged documentary hews to a similar path, dispatching Nick Bourne and younger brother Alex, who has Down’s, to swap tales with similar support networks around the globe.
Narrator Nick has Louis Theroux’s specs, crossed-arm stance and stop-start syntax down pat.
But what he lacks are Theroux’s generally sure journalistic instincts: the sense of where the story lies, the ability to cut to the chase, and the good grace to remove himself from the picture
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