The deep well of personal pain that was the wellspring of Pryor’s comedy is explicitly explored and exorcised in his self-reflective, warts-and-all autobiographical directorial debut, in which comedian Jo Jo Dancer (Pryor) looks back over his life from a hospital bed while recovering, as Pryor had some years before, from third-degree burns received while freebasing cocaine. From boyhood in a Midwestern bordello to show-biz success and the downward spiral of addiction, Pryor dashes out his life’s events on screen in the broad strokes of a caricature artist, proving himself as ever without peer in the art of laughing through the darkness.