'Cheech & Chong's Last Movie' isn't the usual puff piece

Stoner comic duo get real (maybe?) in career-spanning documentary.

One of the most iconic images in ‘70s movie comedy, along with Cleavon Little on a horse and Steve Martin in a bathrobe, is Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, side by side in a car, smoking a joint the size of a Catholic prayer candle.

The new documentary “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” updates that picture, only now Marin and Chong are old men driving through the desert, and the spliff has been traded for a baggie of (now probably legal) gummies. How times have changed.

Those who packed sneak previews of the film (at 4:20 p.m. on 4/20, of course) expecting a stoner comedy in the vein of “Up in Smoke” or “Nice Dreams” might have come away a bit befuddled. Although there’s some fictionalized elements, and some weed here and there, David Bushell’s film is largely a straightforward, deep-dive documentary into an unlikely comic pairing that blazed bright for a few years.

To tell the tale, the film mixes archival interviews, lovingly restored old photos, black-and white underground comics-style animation, and that rather awkward framing device of the present-day pair driving through the desert, ostensibly on one last trip to find “Dave.” These interludes occupy a sort of hazy middle space between real and staged in a way that kept pulling me out of the movie, and away from Cheech and Chong’s genuinely interesting history.

The first part of the movie traces the duo’s unlikely roads to find each other. Chong was a Chinese-Canadian who joined an R&B group and starting a club in Vancouver called the Shanghai Junk that mixed striptease and improv. Marin was a Mexican-American from Los Angeles who fled north to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War.

After a time as a ski bum, he moved to Vancouver and joined Chong’s improv group on a whim. When everybody else quit, Chong and Marin decided to head to Los Angeles to seek their fortune. The film really captures the spirit of the counterculture movement – while Cheech and Chong were apolitical, their gleeful embrace of taboo subjects like sex and drugs, and the fact that they improvised heavily on stage rather than write out their jokes beforehand, was its own form of hippie rebellion.

Their fortunes improved when record label head Lou Adler, who had produced records for The Mamas & The Papas and Carole King, offered to produce a comedy album for them. Their sketches, such as the classic “Dave” (their “Who’s On First”), began getting played on rock radio, and soon the pair had graduated from comedy clubs to theaters and arenas, opening for bands like the Rolling Stones.

Marin dubbed them “hard rock comedy,” and eventually Cheech & Chong would experience that quintessential facet of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle – getting screwed over by your manager. While their first movie, “Up in Smoke,” grossed over $100 million, Cheech & Chong had signed a contract with Adler where they only received $25,000 each.

They got a much better deal on their next movie, “Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie,” but fame and wealth began to curdle the relationship. One thing made abundantly clear in the movie is that while the duo may have partaken of recreational drugs in their off hours, they were straight and serious when working, perhaps almost to a fault. Chong saw himself as the “senior partner” of the duo and wanted to direct all the movies as well as star in them. Who would have thought the man behind the hippy-dippy characters was such a control freak?

Marin felt he was being treated like a hired gun, his ideas ignored, but then Chong would chafe when Marin would go off and do solo work, like the song and movie “Born in East L.A.” By 1984’s flop “The Corsican Brothers,” which asks the question “What if a Cheech & Chong movie had no drugs in it?” the partnership was over.

This all comes to a boil in “Last Movie” in a remarkable on-camera argument between the two as old men. Despite the staginess of the desert scenes, the acrimony and hurt feelings between them feels genuine.

“Last Movie” ends on a note of reconciliation that’s as unconvincing as it is abrupt. But Cheech & Chong always knew what to give their fans, whether they were stoners in the ‘70s or nostalgic Baby Boomers now. And as the documentary shows, they’ve had a long, strange trip along the way.

“Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at AMC Fitchburg, Marcus Palace and Marcus Point.