ongoing

 As the credits role at the of “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,”  the 75-year-old subject of the film jokes – “jokes” – that this film, about a year in her life, would have so much more marketable should she die after its completion. “I’d go!” she says, the joke being the incongruity. She couldn’t because she’d be dead, but she certainly appreciates the commercial value it would have. It’d be a money-maker. She would go out, in a manner of speaking, on top. Being on top – or at least riding out the lows and reaching for the top again and again  – has been integral to the iconic comic throughout her career. It remains so. Hell, to her, is to have a blank datebook. It means no one wants her. Perhaps this is the ugly truth about showbiz: that it doesn’t matter what you’ve achieved or who loves you or what you’ve built, if you’re not working - now - you’re dead. Virtually at least. And most of us can understand that, at least to a degree. (Hopefully, we don’t push it to Rivers’ degree.)
  “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” is a fascinating documentary, capturing the frenzy, the control freak aspect of her personality and the underlying fear that drives her. It’s also funny as hell. The film starts with Rivers on stage in her comic persona – she insists she’s primarily an actress who plays the role of a comic – discussing her daughter’s decision to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars for a topless Playboy shoot. She knows she’s supposed to be, you know, supportive. She can’t quite do it. She says Melissa should have asked for an extra $200,000 to show her “pussy.” That’s a bit of a, gulp, moment. And it’s hilarious. One of many during this year-in-the-life doc, which steps back to chart her evolution as an edgy pioneering female in a male-dominated field to her breakthrough on “The Tonight Show,” to her eventual dismissal as permanent guest host for Carson when she took the competing late night chat show job for FOX. A gig that was very short-lived. But, she says, Carson felt she betrayed him by taking it – he did play a huge role in her rise –- and though she’s bitterly disappointed, you can see she understands too. It's business. She was trying to take what was his, that late night audience. They never talk again. (JSInk Carson non-anecdote: I saw Johnny once, in the latter years of his life, in his yacht anchored in Nantucket harbor. I was just peering in from the dock. And, yes, he was alone. Like he always was, they say. You could read into that a sense of sadness and lonliness, which may have been the truth, as we've learned subsequently. Or maybe a projection. But there he was surrounded by opulence with ... nothing.)
    “A Piece of Work’s” genius is that although obviously edited and sculpted, it doesn’t try to dilute Rivers’ rough sides or make her nicer. Yes, she can be a bitch – in her act on stage and off. And she can be very generous, writing checks for a number of employees and paying for their kids tuitions. She lives sumptuously, without apology. She discusses her less than perfect marriage to Edgar, her business partner, who committed suicide after the FOX show went down, when she was pressured by the network to fire him as producer.
    Life goes on. In fact, art imitates life as she and Melissa make a movie, re-enacting the whole scenario. Weird, yes, but Rivers says it helps her get through the pain.
Rivers is fascinating. Yes, she discusses her plastic surgery obsession – and grouses that at her Comedy Central roast it will be all about plastic surgery and age (yep, it was) – but she also makes the point, not an inaccurate one, that we live in a youth-obsessed culture and to be old is to be in the way. (Remember the bluegrass album Jerry Garcia and friends did, "Old and In the Way?") Yesterday’s papers. Rivers dreads that as much as anything and her striving to maintain a youthful appearance may seem abnormal and perverted even – but not in her world.
   The film, directed by Ricki Starr and Anne Sundberg, explores the anger that often fuels comedy. Also the loneliness that is there if she’s not in her element, on stage. Rivers is given props by her obvious antecedent Kathy Griffin and her peer, Don Rickles.
    “A Piece of Work” is a portrait of the artist as an obsessed being, whose purpose in life is to entertain, be in the spotlight, earn. Has she missed out on other things pursuing that? Certainly. But this is her life, and it’s well worth gazing in. Rivers appears in Boston in December at the Wilbur Theatre in December.
At the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Tickets: $9.75.

290 Harvard St., Brookline, 617-734-2500 www.coolidge.org