How Dark My Love

Even the stigma of cab driving that branded him an outsider has now disappeared, as many of the critics who wrote those pieces now drive ride shares along with everyone else on this outlaw planet.

Gracheff has delivered the best documentary imaginable on one of America’s most visionary painters. That it is all framed as a love story is both unexpected and highly effective at humanizing one so famously inhuman. Both Joe and Whitney can be refreshingly down to earth in a scene that is typically as stuck up as a stiletto heel.

The darker times during Coleman’s heroin addiction are dealt with early and without romance, focusing on a horrifying painting of him asleep while driving a cab after shooting up. There are interesting sequences throughout of folks visiting Coleman, from rockers to conservative in-laws, giving an idea of the richness of his orbit.

Whitney Ward and Joe Coleman soak in the California sun in a scene from How Dark My Love, directed by Scott Gracheff and featured at Tribeca 2025.

“Gracheff has delivered the best documentary imaginable on one of America’s most visionary painters.”

I do wish there had been some harder choices made during post on some of the visits captured. Didn’t see much reason why one of Coleman’s subjects, the singer for the punk rock band Fang, barely known for the songs “Fun with Acid” and “Junkie Pride”, should be immortalized again for strangling a woman to death over heroin by this film. Definitely think it was a huge mistake to overlook the current nausea factor generated by an even less welcome guest associated with a much, much more famous death.

I don’t know if by including this sequence, Gracheff was trying to keep tradition with making the audience vomit, but he will definitely succeed, especially in New York. Half-digested hoagies will fly in projectile waves across the aisles, like fountains in Vegas. But that is only one oozing bruise on an otherwise big, crispy apple. How Dark My Love is a whole lot prettier than expected, but that may be due to how ugly the future has become.

How Dark My Love screened at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.