"Knock, Knock, It's Tig Notaro" (Showtime, premieres Friday). A beautifully made documentary road picture, co-directed by Michael LaHaie and Christopher Wilcha, that accompanies comedian Tig Notaro and opening act/driver John Dore, on a 2013 summer house-concert tour (a house, field, pop-up venue tour, to be precise).
Notaro fans applied to be her hosts. "Are you at all scared of these people?" asks Nick Kroll, to whom Notaro is showing videos from some of them, before leaving. "Absolutely," she replies. (Kroll: "Have you performed in a barn?" Notaro: "Yeah. I've been doing this 17 years." Kroll: "Have you ever performed for a swamp full of alligators?" Notaro: "No, I've only been doing standup for 17 years.") She had done this sort of performance before, as "an experiment in seeing if I could do comedy in a nontraditional venue," frames the present trip, which followed a well-publicized series of health crises and the death of her mother, as a way to get to know her audience.
Slight but steely, she seems like someone who could take you without lifting a finger — by the power of her regard and her clown horn imitation. ("You realize what you're laughing at? It's not much at all.") A lot of what she does onstage — not uniquely, though (I have seen on multiple occasions) with uncommon brilliance — involves shaping the room, playing the crowd, chaning the energy and the temperature. "Knock, Knock" focuses on the off-book, moments, the unplanned exchange leading to the unpredictable conclusion.
Like all road movies, this one is about the temporary intersection of worlds — the portable world of the performers and the settled worlds they pass through. The dates run from Chicago into the south, through impressive weather, green fields and mossy swamps, down to Mississippi, where Notaro was born.
She and Dore make good company for each other and for the viewer. Driving along they create bits, commit horseplay; they stop in thrift stores ("Tig, do you need soccer cleats — with the dirt still on them?"), buy fireworks and shoot them off. Some of their hosts build bigger shows around them, with bands and other comics; some venues are spectacularly intimate — this is close-work comedy. It feels daring, and it feels joyous.
The film winds up in Pluto, Miss., "population eight or nine on a good day," with a performance in a field, on a flatbed trailer lighted by tractor lights. The sky is full of muscled clouds. It rains a little. Tig plays some drums.
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