Knoxville in the Ruins

Jackass 3D was in theaters, and Johnny Knoxville was the most improbable documentary subject in America. The man had spent a decade letting himself be electrocuted, trampled, and launched from various heights for our entertainment—and somewhere in that curriculum vitae was a genuine curiosity about the country that produced him. Detroit Lives is proof of that curiosity.

The short film sends Knoxville through Detroit at its lowest point—the foreclosures, the vacant lots, the eerie quiet where a city used to be. But what he finds there isn’t tragedy porn. It’s artists, musicians, urban farmers, people who stayed or moved in precisely because the collapse had cleared space for something new. The wreckage had become real estate for imagination.

Knoxville is an unlikely guide but a good one. He’s never been a performer who hides behind polish, and this film has none—just a man walking around asking questions, letting people answer. The result is less documentary than portrait: a city at the moment it decides whether to become a ghost or a myth.

There’s something about ruined American cities that gets under my skin in a way pristine ones never do. Detroit, Gary, Cleveland—places where the machine ran and then stopped, and the people who couldn’t leave figured out who they were without it. I’ve never been to Detroit. Detroit Lives makes me want to go.