Come See Me in the Good Light (2025)

Rated R for being an honest look at facing one's mortality.  Life is simultaneously beautiful, funny, bright, joyful and gross, vulgar, and painful.  There's nudity, but it's not in a sexual content.  There is some crude speech about sexual acts, but no on-screen sexual acts.  This is the story about a woman facing those final moments and these moments are not edited for the sake of an audience's comfort.  It does need to be R-rated because the world is R-rated, especially when fighting something that is killing you.

DIRECTOR:  Ryan White

I want to stress that, if I misgender Andrea Gibson, it is an accident.  I struggle when I'm writing quickly.  On top of that, my head is not in the right space.  I have been making so many basic mistakes over the course of this weekend because I have the world on my shoulders right now.  I've done even the simplest of tasks wrong.  Please understand, for Gibson's sake, that I embrace their pronoun.  But I also am giving myself the grace to understand that I have to understand when something is done out of malice and something is done out of best intentions.

My dad died of cancer.  I've probably mentioned it a time or two, but it hasn't always been the center of attention. To be the guy who is openly responding to a story about cancer with "Cancer is bad" seems like a pretty low bar to be meeting.  Come See Me in the Good Light is my least favorite thing about cancer.  It's the weird sense of hope and the notion that you can do something to change things.  The movie starts off with Andrea saying that they want the movie to start with their funeral as their words play over the film.  I thought, "That's a really good idea.  But does this mean that Andrea survives cancer?"  I mean, if the film didn't have that footage, wouldn't have made sense to respect their wishes?  

But as much as this is a story about mortality, this is a story about hope.  Okay, it's a story about all of those elements that goes into a cancer diagnosis.  When we see cancer in fictional films, we see the Hollywood version.  We see the person walking around on a ventilator, hacking up a lung and coughing blood into a toilet bowl.  They're more crochety and offer sage wisdom at the most important part of the film.  Cancer isn't that.  Cancer, for as life-changing as the diagnosis is, is about knowing what parts of life are disappearing every day and finding ways to discover normality.   (Note:  I stopped writing here and there was a long gap between the first part that I wrote and this section.  If there is a disconnect, I apologize.)  Maybe that is part of the human experience too.  Let's separate ourselves from literal cancer for right now.  We're all destined to encounter tragedy.  I don't know if this shocks anyone, but there will be good times and there will be bad times.  What Come See Me in the Good Light understands that there's this need for anything normal.  Even when the abnormal keeps going on, it's an attempt to quarantine that weirdness.

One thing that hit hard is the notion of living in three week increments.  For Andrea and Megan, these three weeks are the time periods between tests to see how much the cancer has progressed within Andrea.  For the sake of storytelling, one of these three week stints is waiting to get permission for Andrea to do one final spoken word performance.  For me, that was exciting to see Tig Notaro, whom we might have tickets to see fairly soon.  Andrea's story of having to do their last performance kind of hit me the hardest throughout the piece.  There's so much out there that I really want to do and I don't know if I'm going to Willy Loman my life away waiting for retirement, only to curl up and pass away before I get the artistic satisfaction that I have been craving.  I suppose the transcendentalist in me wants to go off in the woods now and write that Great American Novel before the world gets too far away.  Still, Andrea positioned themselves into a place where there is simultaneously an abundance of time and no time whatsoever.  

I think I would go crazy if I had Andrea's specific breakdown.  I don't deny that this is a celebration of a relationship and of a life.  Andrea doesn't seem, by any means, paralyzed by the reality of their situation.  That cross weighs over them, but it seems like the Andrea we get in this documentary is the Andrea that was probably the Andrea before the cancer and after the cancer.  But I also know that, when things go bad in my life, I know that I have a litany of responsibilities that I can't afford to indulge in.  That has to be maddening, knowing that final moments are determined by a number at the end.  And when that number was a "10" (which, by context clues, was a very good thing), I wondered if that was either a misread or something else.  The cynic in me said, "That test wasn't done correctly for it to swing so strongly in one direction than the other."  But it also might be part of that unknowable element of medicine.  I mean, I'm a pretty strict follower of Western medicine.  But I can't help but hope that Andrea wanted to do this show so badly that they biologically held the cancer back for enough time to do this performance.

Here's where I feel like a real punk.  Honestly, this entire time I've felt like a  punk writing this.  Come See Me in the Good Light is Andrea and Megan's cancer journey.  It's not mine.  I don't have cancer.  My father died of cancer, so I'm projecting all of my own trauma onto this movie (which is slightly permitted, to a certain extent.)  But the bigger thing that I have to do is that I have to criticize this as a movie.  And, as a movie, I didn't want to let go of the sympathy that I had for Andrea and Meg.  But at a certain point, my mind started to wander.  Yes, I absolutely felt for them.  Once again, this was a story about life as much as it was about death.  I needed to see how Andrea viewed themselves as a teen.  I needed to see what Meg saw in Andrea.  And all of that stuff was very moving.  But there were moments in the movie --and maybe this is completely unfair --where it felt like the movie was padding to be the length of a movie.  Yes, I did learn something about why some LGBTQIA+ people stay friends with their exes.  I liked that a lot.  But I also kept being distracted by people who seemed on the periphery of Andrea's story.  

Do you know what wasn't really communicated much to me?  As much as this is about Andrea and their art, I never really dealt with the scale of someone being a poet laureate.  There was one moment where it really hit me.  Andrea's final performance was sold out on the marquee.  I thought, "Man, it's hard to fill a theater with a poet."  Because as much as this is about Andrea's poetry, Andrea seems almost too normal to be a poet laureate.  Okay, there's definitely things in there that I only saw in my artsy-fartsy literature circles.  But from any stretch of the imagination, Andrea's story is almost one of how normal they are compared to what we associate with this prestigious title.  One of the things that Andrea clings to, especially when it comes to writing, is the idea that they don't know a lot of words.  I mean, I get frustrated by that entire concept.  But realistically, I kind of applaud the fact that the key element of any kind of communication is clarity.  It's not like their poetry is necessarily easy to process.  It's just not raising its nose to its audience. At that to the entire piece of Andrea being a small town basketball player who found an outlet in spoken word and all of the choices that we see lead to a consistent image of Andrea as someone who just wants to talk.  

Is this movie going to change me?  I'm such a jerk, but I don't think it will.  I think we've talked a little bit about how much I feel the pain of cancer.  But, as effective as this is as a tribute to a beautiful human being, it almost acts as a better tribute to their families and friends than it does to a general audience.  What it does for me is give me awareness of an artist I was unfamiliar with.  But this thing acts as something sacred to those who knew Andrea.  This work should exist, but I don't know as an all-audiences thing.  The people who love this would treasure this forever.  Regardless, it gives us a photo of someone who moved mountains in their own way.