'Sorry/Not Sorry' review: Louis C.K.'s misdeeds inspire thought-provoking doc

When the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Louis C.K. Is Accused by 5 Women of Sexual Misconduct” in November of 2017, it was a month after the Times and the New Yorker had published articles detailing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein. And it was three years after a series of reports about Bill Cosby’s long and monstrous history of sexual assault.

In a weird kind of way, it could be argued C.K. actually benefited from the timing of the oft-repeated rumors and stories about him finally becoming public, because while his actions were horrific — he masturbated in person or on the phone with a number of comedians and talked in wildly inappropriate fashion to others — they weren’t in the same hellish league as the crimes committed by Weinstein and Cosby.

The long-run fallout of the Louis C.K. scandal is the subject of the thought-provoking New York Times documentary “Sorry/Not Sorry” from directors and producers Caroline Suh and Cara Moses, which shines a spotlight on the difficult questions raised when someone’s egregious actions result in them being “canceled.” Where do we draw the line? What’s the expiration date on showbiz exile, whether self-imposed or enacted by various factions of the industry?

Of course, everyone has their own standards, their own codes of conduct, their own rules regarding punishment and forgiveness. A documentary can’t answer these questions because they’re essentially unanswerable.

“Sorry/Not Sorry” notes that after the article came out, C.K. issued a statement saying, “These stories are true.” A scheduled appearance on “Colbert” was canceled. His movie “I Love You Daddy,” a tone-deaf story with C.K. playing a father who is upset by the possibility his 17-year-old daughter is having an affair with a predatory, 68-year-old, Woody Allen-esque director, essentially faded into the mist. Deals with F/X, HBO and Netflix disappeared.

Nine months later, C.K. was back onstage at the Comedy Cellar. He won a Grammy for best comedy album in 2022 and has sold out Madison Square Garden. When C.K. has addressed the scandal onstage, it has been in terms of how it affected him, not his victims, e.g., moaning that he lost $35 million in one day and talking about how embarrassing it is when even Barack Obama knows about his issues.

Unlike C.K. (who declined to be interviewed for this film), the documentary focuses largely two of the women he victimized, Jen Kirkman and Abby Schachner (the latter of whom was turned into a punchline by Dave Chappelle), and writer-comedian Megan Koester, who was subjected to harsh criticism for putting a name on stories that had circulated for more than a decade. Cara Buckley, who along with fellow New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Melena Ryzik broke the story, crystallizes the crux of the documentary when she says, “If something horrible has happened to you, why should it continue to hurt you when you bring it to light? That to me is the more interesting question and almost the more important one.”

If there’s a lesson to be drawn from “Sorry/Not Sorry,” Jen Kirkman outlines it well onstage, when she notes:

“I always put it this way. ... For women in comedy, there’s always a threat of rain, so we carry an umbrella everywhere. And for men, they just get to walk out the door and assume it’s going to be sunny. We always have to think of something, we always have to be aware that the men that work with us might be trying to get something out of us.”