Ethan Hawke begins “The Last Movie Stars,” his six-hour documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, with a video-conferenced gathering. Peering into a laptop, his pandemic hair curling over his shoulders, he welcomes a similarly informal procession of actors to his project: George Clooney, Laura Linney, Billy Crudup, Oscar Isaac, Zoe Kazan, Sally Field, Sam Rockwell and many others. It’s like watching a cast gather for an early-morning table read.

“The Last Movie Stars,” which premiered last week on HBO Max, is the story of two of America’s most honored and most famous performers, as well as the story of a particularly public, highly fraught half-century marriage. It’s a sprawling, complicated tale, and Hawke — who took it on at the request of one of Newman and Woodward’s children — responds to the challenge with an approach that’s both exhaustive and disarmingly casual. Profiling two icons of cool, he doesn’t try to match them. He adopts the role of enthusiastic fan and master of ceremonies.

尽管它在其六集中失去动力，但结果是迷人，娱乐性的，对眼睛上瘾。该系列在一部分是传统的，年代的传记，纽曼和伍德沃德在电影和电视片段，摄影，访谈和家庭电影中一直在屏幕上。这是一大堆美丽和个性，没有太多的纪录片可以匹配。

不过，使该节目与众不同的是参加大批霍克的同事。他们代替了您通常会在历史纪录片中找到的学术说话的头脑，他们的一部分是为霍克对纽曼和伍德沃德的生活和职业的沉思担任对话者和声音板。

但是在大多数情况下，他们不是在那里说话，而要采取行动。霍克（Hawke）可以访问纽曼从未完成的口述历史进行的一系列访谈的抄本。(A book based on the material is scheduled for publication this fall.) So the story is told on the soundtrack through excerpts from these vivid, surprisingly frank interviews, read by Hawke’s cast: Clooney as Newman, Linney as Woodward, Brooks Ashmanskas as Gore Vidal, Vincent D’Onofrio as Karl Malden, Bobby Cannavale as Elia Kazan and so on. A biography of two consummate actors becomes an exercise in performance.

最引人注目的“最后Mov吗ie Stars” is probably its account of Newman and Woodward’s difficult personal lives: the five years they carried on an affair while he was still married to his first wife; the ravages of his alcoholism and the toll of his insecurities; the effects on their children of their commitments to work (and later, for him, to auto racing and philanthropy).

But the most engaging parts come early, when they’re young aspiring actors who can’t keep their hands off each other. There’s an electricity, and a joy, in the accounts of the Actors Studio and life in 1950s New York, and the images are often more potent for being less familiar: Newman on a horse auditioning for “Oklahoma!,” or in period costume for his embarrassing film debut in “The Silver Chalice.” As the story gets darker over the years, the series loses some of its verve, and it starts to feel like a forced march through the two stars’ movie and TV catalogs. Hawke doesn’t seem as comfortable, or as interested, whenever the subject moves away from acting.

He’s also handicapped by the unfortunate reality that many, if not most, of the movies that Newman and Woodward made, including Newman’s biggest hits, were beneath their talents. It mostly passes without comment that we’re seeing clips from one bad movie after another, though Hawke doesn’t entirely shy away from it. “The Towering Inferno,” an easy target, is skewered; more boldly, Hawke leads into “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” with a Martin Ritt quotation that damns the blockbuster with faint praise.

在明显的致敬中，可以理解电影的不足是可以理解的。鉴于霍克（Hawke）专注于表演，更不幸的是，令人惊讶的是，纽曼在电影《布朗克斯堡》，《判决》和（与伍德沃德先生”等电影中的惊人后期复兴的复兴。布里奇太太”被打包到最后一集中，并未清楚地描述。这样做意味着指出纽曼在过去几十年中打电话的频率。碰巧的是，我们确实从一个声音中听到了这一点：纽曼自己的声音。关于自己或他的工作，他很少有话要说。

纽曼和伍德沃德的孩子，以及纽曼的第一婚姻，是强大的存在，尤其是在后来的一集中，但最残酷，最有见地和通常的评论来自这两个主题的复古报价，尤其是伍德沃德。(One of the few original interviewees who is still alive, she was found to have Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, a year before Newman died.) It was never a secret that she was, for much of their time together, a better actor than her vastly more famous husband, and that her career went into eclipse when she took on most of the burden of caring for their children. But it’s still sobering to hear, in her own words, how clearly she saw the disparities and how deeply she felt them.

Hawke and his editor, Barry Poltermann, elegantly weave together their assortment of material. The readings of the old interviews are played mostly on top of the film clips, with the sound mixed so that the voices in the interviews and in the movies alternate, fading in and out.

With so many movies to choose from, Hawke is almost always able to make the clips correlate with what’s being said about Newman’s and Woodward’s lives, in ways that can be obvious but are often clever. While we hear Newman’s first wife, Jackie McDonald (voiced by Kazan), talk about being replaced by Woodward, we see — but don’t hear — scenes of “From the Terrace,” in which Woodward played the wife being abandoned by Newman’s character. (A nice touch in the casting: When Robert Altman is quoted in regard to “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” he is voiced by Native American director Sterlin Harjo.)

霍克问：“成为他们是什么感觉？”，您可能会带走的答案是，这很像是我们 - 艰难，恐惧，快乐和冒险的人，而且音量上升了。通过悲剧，不忠，醉酒和专业的嫉妒，纽曼和伍德沃德的差异与名望或成就无关，而是与热情：纽曼和伍德沃德相互疯狂的50多年。每当他们在一起在屏幕上时，您会用他们的话语听到它，并且清楚地看到了水晶。