To an older generation, they were Stiller & Meara, the comedy duo with an endless reserve of gently absurd sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show. To a younger generation, he was the fulminating father of George Costanza on Seinfeld.

To Ben Stiller, of course, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were something far more intimate: his lovable but deeply complicated parents.

The Severance-y Stiller documents his forebears in all their messy glory in Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, a new documentary that world-premiered at the New York Film Festival Sunday ahead of its debut in theaters and on Apple TV+ later this month. What starts (and indeed what started out) as an affectionate but membrane-thick portrait of American comedy royalty turns into something unimaginably layered, investigating numerous spousal and parental relationships — and asking tough questions about the price of perfectionism, the pitfalls of parenthood and, really, the ultimate value of an earthly life.

“Yeah, it’s a little personal,” Stiller said before the screening as he described what his family thought of him embarking on this quest. “But it’s also, I think, in a way about everyone.” 

Even to those who know the comedy of the Jewish-American Stiller and Irish-American Meara (they died in 2020 and 2015, respectively), some of the background will surprise — he, an army veteran from an unloving Brooklyn home who urgently sought validation from audiences; she, a nimble comic talent weighted down by her mother’s suicide when she was still a girl. 

Ben Stiller, who does not skimp on his parents’ best moments in front of a camera, is also not afraid to expose the dark side they showed to him and his older sister Amy; subjects like Anne’s alcoholism and Jerry’s work obsession at the expense of his family each get rich treatment. And the elder Stiller’s relentless devotion to Meara — he is seen on-screen just once from the recent past, and it’s to tout the greatness of his late wife — could blind him to her flaws and the ways her behavior at times might have been hurting the family. 

But it is when Stiller turns the camera on himself — or more specifically on his wife and two kids — that the film clicks into gear, asking how much we repeat the mistakes of our parents and the limits of what we can learn from the past. Ben Stiller sought to avoid the trap of putting his work above his family, but over the course of making the movie touchingly realizes, with his kids nearly grown, he has in fact replicated it. In one of the film’s most pointed moments, Stiller’s 20-year-old son Quin sensitively tells his father he feels he and his sister came second to Ben’s work, much as Ben felt he did with Jerry. The look on the director’s face in that moment says it all.

“As a filmmaker, i think ‘this is a good moment for the movie.’ Stiller said after the screening of that interaction. “But personally it’s ‘oh that sucks.’” (Stiller called out to his kids who were at the screening to ask what they thought of the film and Quin yelled back “Terrible,” to laughter, before clarifying that he thought it was great.)

Apart from the whole famous thing, the title couple also lived exceedingly shared lives, and the film is interested in the impossible tangle of a 24-hour life and work partnership, where, as Anne says, it can be hard to know where the comedy team ends and the marriage begins. Ben Stiller and his wife Christine Taylor also frequently worked together, though with slightly fewer pitfalls; Taylor’s voice, it should be said, brings high levels of consideration and insight in a film not lacking for either quality.

Stiller sets the film at the sprawling Upper West Side apartment where Anne and Jerry raised their family and to which Ben and Amy have returned after Jerry’s death to go through, pack up and throw out all their parents’ stuff to prepare for the sale of the longtime home. And there is so much stuff. Jerry Stiller had a compulsive need to record and save everything, and as we watch Ben Stiller take it all in after his father’s death, there is something both humanizing and surreal at the sight of a famous actor undergo the same heartwrenching ritual as everyone else.

At that rummage-y point several years ago, Ben Stiller had no idea where his filmic lark would lead. Because Jerry Stiller had died during COVID there was no memorial, and Ben simply thought of his shoots as a kind of cinematic equivalent of one: important to the family and comedy completists, of little interest to anyone else. 

But as he showed footage to friends and entertainment colleagues, he began to get a certain kind of feedback: maybe it would work better if you went deeper and even bared your own soul? “I was pushing myself out of it because I didn’t want it to be about me,” Stiller said at the screening. “And I realized I had to go the opposite way.”

If the director comes out of this process feeling, dishearteningly, that parental mistakes have been repeated, he does possess the vulnerability to admit it. While full generational improvement may be a pipe dream, the movie at least suggests the benefits of the modern urge to explore and expose. One can’t imagine the subjects of the film ever turning a critical eye on themselves in this way; indeed, Jerry seems uncomfortable whenever Anne discusses even banal details of their relationship on camera. (Ben Stiller after the screening said he thought his mother would like the movie, but his father might be uncomfortable with how much was shared.)

The film is subtitled “Nothing Is Lost,” and while its melancholy aura in fact contradictorily suggests that so much fades, as the Stillers comb through both artifacts and feelings, the movie also finds much encouragement in the sheer bid, however uncomfortable, to make sure some things are preserved.