I recently finished watching the documentary I Like Me (which I, at least, found streaming on Amazon), a loving remembrance of the great comic actor John Candy. It’s a touching delight. It is also, along the way, a love letter to Candy’s native Toronto. And it gives us a look at some very un-Hollywood aspects of Candy’s life: as a Catholic, a family man, and a guy who tried to volunteer for the Vietnam War despite being (as a Canadian) safely immune from the American military draft.

Making a full-length film about the life of John Candy is a challenge. Biographical documentaries thrive on conflict and a dramatic arc, and Candy’s life has neither. He seems to have been beloved by everyone he encountered, and his career was nothing but an upward arc from obscurity to major stardom, marred only by an increasing volume of bad movies in his final four years due to not turning down enough scripts. Even that seems unlikely to have been a permanent condition, and the film attributes it to Candy’s tendency to appear in movies as a favor to other people.

That 1991–94 down period nonetheless included credits in memorable films such as JFK and Career Opportunities, and it also included what seems to be the happiest achievement of Candy’s life: co-owning the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League when it won the Grey Cup as league champions in 1991, powered by former Notre Dame star Raghib “Rocket” Ismail. The film notes Candy’s particular popularity with Argonauts fans even compared with co-owner Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hero in the history of Canada’s national sport.

Between 1980 and 1990, Candy contributed — in roles ranging from co-starring to small but memorable cameos — to ten films that were iconic in their era, several of which remain so: The Blues Brothers (1980), Stripes (1981), National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Splash (1984), Brewster’s Millions (1985), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Spaceballs (1987), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), Uncle Buck (1989), and Home Alone (1990).

At least two of those (National Lampoon’s Vacation and Home Alone) were mega-blockbuster films in which Candy was called in on short notice at the last minute to get the plot to a successful ending. He was as comfortable doing that as he was co-headlining a film. In the same decade, his credits ranged from other hit headlined films to music videos to Sesame Street movies as well as his star-making turn on the sketch comedy show SCTV that ran on and off between 1976 and 1983.

The lovingly crafted documentary, directed by Colin Hanks (son of Tom and a successful actor in his own right) and with the on-camera cooperation of Candy’s widow and two (now-adult) children, features a star-studded cast of Candy’s collaborators from his earliest stage work to TV and film, including Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, Martin Short, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, and Macaulay Culkin. Murray, Aykroyd, and Levy share the experience of coming up with Candy from obscurity. Hanks and Martin cite him as an acting mentor, given that Splash was the role that made Hanks a major star, and Planes, Trains & Automobiles was the role that cemented Martin’s transition from standup to acting. Culkin touchingly cites him as a father figure who compared favorably to Culkin’s poisonous relationship with his own father. The film also explores Candy’s bond with now-departed directors Harold Ramis and, especially, John Hughes.

The film roots its dramatic arc in the death of Candy’s father at age 35 on Candy’s fifth birthday on Halloween in 1955, a loss that understandably lent him a lifelong fear of death and loss and expectation of early death that contributed both to life in a hurry and to disregard of his own health (this reminded me of biographies of Mickey Mantle). That’s the foundation of the film’s emotional power and its explanation of what Candy drew on to create memorable characters, the greatest of which was Del Griffith, the chatty, lonely traveling salesman of Planes, Trains & Automobiles. It’s Griffith’s response in a classic scene with Martin that provides the film’s title as well as its credo.