‘Zero Intention of Living Quietly’ Review: Adam Pearson Documentary

At some point in the last 10 to 15 years, the phrase “representation matters” crossed over, at least for me, from a key directive to a tired cliché. I’d grown frustrated by the way some took it to mean that merely putting a (LGBTQ/POC/poor/disabled/what have you) person onscreen was the end goal rather than a first step; the accompanying pressure for those marginalized communities to “feel seen” by these depictions; the implication that making people “feel seen” should be art’s loftiest ambition in the first place.

But I never disagreed with the sentiment itself, only the oversimplification of it. A new documentary about Under the Skin and A Different Man star Adam Pearson, who has facial disfigurement from neurofibromatosis, serves as a refreshingly thoughtful and touchingly intimate reminder of its truth — at least, when Zero Intention of Living Quietly isn’t tripping over its own eagerness to remind you how thoughtful and intimate and true it is.

Directed by Edward Lovelace, the film serves as a loose memoir for Pearson. Footage of his present life is interspersed with old photos and home movies and film and television clips to chronicle his experience with neurofibromatosis and his intermittent career as a performer — from talent shows in his youth (including, delightfully, one performance in which he’s dressed as Avril Lavigne), to his breakout role at 26 in 2013’s Under the Skin and subsequent reality TV appearances, to his even bigger second breakout in 2024’s A Different Man.

Throughout, the idea of representation — what it can look like, what it can mean — serves as an overarching theme. From the dark of an empty movie theater, or over clips of favorite movies, Pearson speaks of seeing his own wants or challenges reflected in characters like Buzz Lightyear or Forrest Gump or Elle Woods. He also reflects on the way others have projected their own ideas about him through stories like The Elephant Man, and not necessarily for the better: “That goddamn film came out and my gosh, did the world let me know about it,” he grouses before recalling a particularly horrific incident of adolescent bullying.

But the concept comes through most meaningfully in the relationship at the film’s heart, between Pearson and Ellie, a teenager living with the same rare genetic condition and who shares a similar hope of becoming a performer. Pearson’s been recruited by Ellie’s mother to serve as a sort of big brother who might be able to help her understand what she’s going through — something, he notes, he wishes he’d had himself growing up.

Unexpectedly to Pearson, the relationship turns out to go both ways. His desire to set a positive example for Ellie inspires him to let go of his own fears and pursue anew his own goal of becoming a performer, which he’d gradually set aside in the wake of a painful nightclub assault and growing worry about being treated as an object of fascination or revulsion or pity in his public appearances. Otherwise, he reasons, he’d be “a hypocrite” for telling Ellie the condition doesn’t have to thwart her dreams when he’s let it thwart his.

His ongoing interest in the mainstream visibility of disabled and disfigured people takes on a more personal dimension as he considers what it would mean for Ellie — not only some nebulous idea of “people with disabilities,” but this specific dear friend — to see faces like his onscreen, and especially to see them as not being defined solely by their difference. His refired ambition most prominently manifests in his decision to star in A Different Man, after initially declining to even read the script.

It’s a moving arc, and a deeply relatable one — I suspect just about anyone who’s ever had a kid look up to them understands that urge to become the hero they think you are. Which is why it’s frustrating that Zero Intention of Living Quietly works too hard to sell it.

Pearson’s initial reluctance to do A Different Man, for example, is illustrated in dramatic close-ups of him deleting emails about it from his inbox, while a later scene expresses his anxiety during the film’s Berlin press conference by having the sound fade out as if he’s a shell-shocked soldier in a war movie. Such moments feel not only wholly unnecessary (we all know what “not responding to an email” looks like) but clumsily staged, in a way that inspires one to wonder how much else of this story has been amplified or obscured or otherwise tidied up for the sake of a prettier narrative.

Then there’s the score by Stephen Rennicks and Hugh Drumm. Its wistful, tinkly piano seems designed to remind us how very serious and important the story we’re watching unfold is, to impose a sense of poignancy by sheer force of will. Instead, it has the effect of distancing us from what’s actually happening onscreen, reminding us that we ought to be feeling big feelings instead of letting us sit in them.

Zero Intention thankfully resists the temptation to make Pearson into some angelic hero, allowing him to speak candidly about his fears around the progression of his condition, or the loneliness and anger he’s struggled with, or how he used to verbally bully others in turn (“If my disability is fair game, anything is fair game,” he recounts of his reasoning). At the same time, it seems reluctant to dig into any of those thornier topics too deeply, lest its arc stray too far from the rousing but frankly generic conclusion that Pearson is now “done with fear.”

It needn’t have sweated so much. Zero Intention’s biggest selling points are simply Pearson and Ellie themselves, both of whom come across as utterly likable without trying too hard to be so. In their bond — in the fierce affection Ellie has for one of the few people in her life who can understand exactly what she’s going through, in the seriousness with which Pearson takes the responsibility to make a better world for her — the film becomes an affecting reminder that “representation matters” became a cliché because of how plainly, enduringly true it is.