Spacey Unmasked: "The issue of Kevin was certainly well known"
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Sexual misconduct and assaults allegedly committed by actor Kevin Spacey against numerous non-consenting colleagues, employees, and classmates.
The story
I didn't have high hopes for Spacey Unmasked, really. Between its placement on Investigation Discovery (where it airs tonight; it's also going to stream on Max) and its subject's vehement pushback against the accusations the documentary contains, the feature seemed unlikely to impress.
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But while it's not an instant genre classic or anything, director/producer Katherine Haywood (Who Is Ghislaine Maxwell?) does do a few things very well with Spacey Unmasked – starting with the project's focused mandate. It's under two hours; it's not rehashing too much of the trial coverage from 2023, or trying to furnish a potted biographical psychoanalysis of Spacey as a predator (or a victim, as his brother – the splendidly shod Rod Stewart impersonator and limo driver Randy Fowler – suggests Spacey may have been, at least tangentially). It's inviting victims to come forward to give testimony, men "who were not involved with the trial," and making that testimony the backbone of the narrative. (My esteemed colleague Adam B. Vary, who covered Anthony Rapp's allegations against Spacey for Buzzfeed, provides the entertainment reporter's perspective, and he's insightful as always.)
Not that a couple of line items in Spacey's IMDb entry don't suggest further investigation – burning down a sibling's treehouse (allegedly) and getting packed off to military school; the fact that, to date, he's only faced accountability from a corporate entity – but Spacey Unmasked isn't aiming for completeness on the subject of Spacey himself. Nor does it dwell on the failures of institutions to protect his (alleged) targets, but that's actually smart, because 1) that's a massive undertaking, and 2) the great Maureen Ryan already undertook it with Burn It Down. Spacey Unmasked sticks to a more basic brief: recounting the deleterious effects of Spacey's (...alleged) actions, actions that present pretty consistently over the course of 50 years.
In that regard, the doc is quite effective. Watching men like Scott, an ex-Marine, becoming helplessly emotional as they relive their traumas, is painful, not to mention how maddening it is to realize how much each story shares with the others, when each guy felt so alone: Spacey's weird dissociative behavior during the encounters, followed by a snap back to raconteur mode; his targets' freezing up, then their knee-jerk feelings of shame and self-loathing (the phrase "must have brought this on myself somehow" comes up more than once).
But each time I scribbled "poor kid" or "oh, buddy" in my notes, it felt like a credit to Spacey Unmasked – and to the kids and buddies in question, of course, for making themselves vulnerable so others could see themselves, and then perhaps see some hope, in their experiences. Every depressed, paralyzed, nihilistic reaction the talking-head interviewees record is heartbreakingly common and understandable, and more than that, I think hearing from a range of men – some buff, some spindly; some straight, some not – makes it easier for non-survivors to capital-G Get It.
Scott notes at one point that "everyone" he tells his story to is like, oh, I'd have punched him in the face; Scott, who has biceps the size of hams, sighs, "Actually, no. No, you wouldn't have." Sometimes, for people who haven't had to confront unwanted attention or abuse of this type, who haven't felt both invisible and unlovably wrong in this specific way, there's something about it that doesn't sink in for them. I think the interviewees of Spacey Unmasked make an ugly and all too common experience a little more emotionally…legible, especially within the emotional constructs of masculinity, and that's valuable.
Recently, I had a conversation with my esteemed colleague Mark Blankenship for an upcoming Docket episode about "confidently minor" books, and how the true-crime genre could benefit from more of them: tightly focused, pace-forward, done and dusted in 275 pages B/B-pluses. Spacey Unmasked fits in that category on the documentary side. It sticks to its logline, keeps victims front and center, makes the most of the footage it has while not getting too bogged down in minutiae*, and rolls credits in under two hours. It's hard to watch at times, but powerful and relatable as well.
*It does resurface that deranged "Let Me Be Frank" video from a few years ago, which I'd forgotten about and which makes the whole RFK Jr. endorsement…well, not "make sense," but it's of a piece.