Morgan Neville's Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in Two Pieces explores the cultural phenomenon that is Steve Martin

With his latest documentary, Morgan Neville aims to capture the essence of the comedy great, Steve Martin (pictured). (Apple TV+)

“I guarantee you, I have no talent — none,” Steve Martin declares without a trace of sarcasm in the opening scenes of Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in Two Pieces.

The 78-year-old says this despite his enduring, decades-long Hollywood acting career and the fact he was the biggest comedian of all time before he ever set foot on a film set.

Morgan Neville, the Academy Award-winning director behind the documentary, isn’t sure he agrees with Martin. He says it was Martin’s persistence in pursuing his childhood dream of a career on stage, despite feeling he lacked the talent to do so, that inspired him to tell the comedian-turned-actor’s story, with two distinct feature-length films.

Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in Two Pieces was very deliberately titled — this is not a case of a too-long film haphazardly cleaved in two as an afterthought.

‘Then’ tells the story of Martin’s journey to find his voice as a creative, reinventing comedy in the process

It features musings from Martin gleaned from over 20 hours of interviews. The likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Gopnik and Bob Einstein provide commentary.

Martin’s decades-old diary entries and family photos of his childhood in Orange County, California, are put on display. And endearing archival footage from Martin’s early years in stand-up transports us to the mid-60s and 70s, around which time his unique brand of comedy stopped confusing American audiences and started enthralling them in their droves.

“Then” also considers how Martin reached Beatlemania levels of stardom through his comedy.

Was it because his routines gave Americans the permission to play with balloons, don fake noses and be silly amidst the horrors of an irrevocably changing sociopolitical landscape, the Vietnam war and broader political unrest? Was it the fact Martin’s early comedy was informed by his studies in philosophical thought, which led him to subvert the rules of stand-up? Or could it have been some combination of the two?

“To become the biggest stand-up in the world, Martin went on this whole creative journey to figure out comedy… And then he retires [from comedy in 1980] without telling anybody,” Neville says.

It’s clear Neville is still fascinated by the move.

“You go into show business because people show affection towards you and it makes you feel good,” he says.

“And for somebody like Steve, who [had a difficult childhood], you think, ‘If I become the biggest, most loved comedian, everything will be fine’.

“Steve gets there and, surprise, it doesn’t make him happy. And so, he’s like, ‘How do I solve myself? What do I need to become a happier person?'”

The second film, ‘Now’, is the tale of that pursuit of happiness

It’s only in “Now” that present-day Martin appears on screen. We are invited into the home he shares with his second wife, writer Anne Stringfield, and their 11-year-old daughter (whose identity is cleverly concealed throughout by illustrations nodding to Martin’s cartoon memoir).

Neville films Martin for an untold number of hours as he goes about his everyday life — frequently with his longtime comedy partner and current Only Murders In The Building co-star Martin Short delightfully in tow — while considering how he went from being “riddled with anxiety” in his 30s, to “really happy” in his 70s.

“I said to Steve in the beginning, ‘Doing this project is going to be therapy for both of us’. I guess you could say documentary is a very expensive form of therapy,” Neville laughs.

“When I finally showed it to him, he sent me an email saying, ‘I love it’. And then 10 minutes later, he sent me another email saying, ‘Can I show it to my shrink?'”

To Neville, the insight into Martin’s experience of celebrity isn’t what he finds most interesting or wants people to take away from this story, but “the relatability of it”; the life lessons that can be gleaned from one man’s gruelling attempt to make it in comedy for 15 years, until he suddenly exceeded all expectations of what he could do, only to realise the life he’d wanted wasn’t the one he needed. (And that man just happens to be Steve Martin.)

There is a lot that Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in Two Pieces leaves out. Neville says that’s by design

“Film is reductive. A person is a very complex being and a life is very hard to reduce, so I think of it more like I’m trying to capture an essence rather than a wholeness,” Neville explains.

“My goal going into it was: ‘Do you come away understanding, essentially, who Steve is and what motivates him and how he thinks?’

“There are a lot of things he did that I don’t even really talk about [in the films]. Even Steve was like, ‘God, you really didn’t mention [my play] Picasso at the Lapin Agile’, or him winning an Oscar, or all these other things.”

Little time is spent on Martin’s contribution to Saturday Night Live. And criticisms of Martin’s less politically correct works are only given the barest of hints as Martin attempts to don his costume jacket from Three Amigos, which is now so tight it no longer buttons, to which Martin declares: “The humiliation is complete.”

Martin was likely talking about the fact he has gained weight since the 1986 film (and Steve, if you’re reading this, weight gain is normal and fine). Read between the lines and this may have been more than just a reference to the uncomfortable fit of an almost 40-year-old costume.

“I don’t feel like there’s nothing left to say about Steve,” Neville finishes.

“I feel like I said something about him and I asked questions and hopefully gave some kind of an essence of him, but there is so much more.”

Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in Two Pieces is streaming on Apple TV+.