Podcasting and stand-up comic legend Marc Maron has been cemented in the cultural zeitgeist as a charming curmudgeon. His on-stage persona frequently takes the shape of a casual lecture, if your professor was prone to sitting on a stool and shouting in a sardonic mix of self-deprecation and fist-shaking-at-the-sky liberalism. His persona behind the mic, meanwhile, for WTF (which now has over 1,600 episodes since its inception in September 2009) is that of a close friend, interviewing his celebrity guests in a distinctly unique style of conversation with bare honesty, leaving his deepest and funniest demons out in the open.

In Are We Good?, longtime collaborator Steven Feinartz captures Maron in yet another, sweeter light. Merely a few months into the pandemic, Maron lost his partner, Lynn Shelton, the indie filmmaker who directed him in Sword of Trust and Netflix’s G.L.O.W. A mixed-media bio-doc, the film simultaneously documents Maron’s relationship to his own grief alongside more conventional reportage of the comedian’s path from his childhood in New Mexico to his college days in Boston and his heavy hand in the founding of the alt-comedy scenes in New York and Los Angeles.

Maron’s trademark nakedness is broadcast through direct interviews, the repurposing of his many Instagram live videos, and snippets of his most viral conversations with the likes of former President Barack Obama, Robin Williams, Patton Oswalt, and his initial meeting with Shelton on the mic.

Marc Maron’s Interiority Is On Refreshingly Full Display

Feinartz, who concurrently directed Maron’s specials From Bleak to Dark (2023) and Panicked (2025), fittingly casts his subject in the same blistering vulnerability that has made his podcast so refreshing. John Mulaney, David Cross, W. Kamau Bell, and Caroline Rhea are among the talking heads who offer a complex mix of acidic criticism and loving admiration of their friend and colleague.

Notably, however, Feinartz does not leave out instances in which Maron is seen in a specifically negative light. Maron jokes in the film’s opening moments that this documentary will “ruin” him because of the opinions being offered therein, but in truth, the documentary ends up being a holistic portrait of one of contemporary comedy’s most beloved icons. It is a fitting complementary piece to WTF.

The film is, most of all, an aching tribute to the cosmic love shared by Maron and Shelton. “I loved her, and she loved me, and I knew that,“ Maron relays in the WTF episode where he announces her pᴀssing, “I was better in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.” What follows is a portrayal of Maron as a difficult personality whose comedy journey was, at times, defined by his predilection for cocaine and a casual, perpetual burning of bridges. Actor Michaela Watkins offers that what made their relationship so special was that Shelton loved Maron’s “pugnaciousness,” while Maron made Shelton laugh harder than she ever had.

Throughout the film, Maron jokes with Feinartz behind the camera in consternation over the very idea of making a documentary. He specifically jokes about certain tired tropes of the bio-doc format, asking if Feinartz will be animating anecdotes and WTF episodes, a hilarious and sly dig at lesser films than this.

But Feinartz doesn’t do that, opting instead to display an audio line on a black screen whenever using an episode from the podcast. It testifies to the filmmaker’s inherent understanding of radio’s ability to tap into the unconscious. As much as Maron’s life has been on a stage or on screen, it’s inescapable that, for many fans, he is merely a voice, a voice that has transported audiences to beautifully intimate and intellectual places.

Are We Good? Is An Uncommon Portrait Of The Artist’s Relationship To Grief

Are We Good? is a raw documentary about an artist who traffics primarily in rawness. Maron’s process as a comic is portrayed as distinctly messy and chaotic, but also savvy and distinct. WTF started before podcasting was the ubiquitous art form it is today, and primarily, in Maron’s words, as a way to reconcile with some of the bridges he had burnt.

It’s fitting, therefore, that it is the show that revitalized his once fledgling career, a combination of his gifts of perception and anxiety-fueled confessions. So, too, has his career after Shelton’s untimely pᴀssing been reflective of a softer, heartbroken man who found his person in his mid-50s only for her to be taken away. But the comedy has to continue. “It’s a ҒUCҜing nightmare. There’s no one way to do it,” Maron says on stage about the right way to handle grief, “It’s an ongoing nightmare.” But how can an artist stop making art?

“I’m just doing it because that’s what I do.” Lynn Shelton would do the same.