Parents' Guide to Lucy and Desi

Even if you think you already know everything there is to know about the celebrity power couple behind I Love Lucy and Desilu Productions, this documentary will keep you entertained. But chances are you'll also learn a few new things in Amy Poehler's engaging documentary Lucy and Desi. And, you'll probably hear and see new things as well, thanks to Poehler's blend of audiotape recordings and archive footage. Lucy and Desi is fast-paced, smoothly editing together dozens if not hundreds of clips into a chronological arc backgrounding both stars' childhoods and unlikely rise to fame, their professional careers and personal lives, and finally their later years and deaths. There is never a dull moment.

Interviews with the couple's children, the children of regular collaborators, archivists, and female comedians like Carol Burnett and Bette Midler, among others, help flesh out and add perspective to the details of their lives. At its core, Lucy and Desi is a grand love story between two people from very different walks of life, a pair who loved and were devoted to each other even decades after their divorce. It's also a celebration of two individuals who truly made history in mid-century America, from their mold-breaking cross-cultural marriage to the early feminist narratives of their shows to the power they wielded and the barriers they broke at the head of a major production studio.