‘Will & Harper’ review: Will Ferrell and Harper Steele’s documentary explores friendship, acceptance, and self-discovery

Will Ferrell and Harper Steele's road trip documentary explores friendship, acceptance, and self-discovery in a heartwarming journey across America.

Will Ferrell and Harper Steele were friends from their Saturday Night Live days. Ferrell became one of the breakout stars of the popular sketch comedy show where Steele was the head writer from 2004 to 2008. The two continued to be friends and collaborators, going to games and dive bars and co-writing the glorious Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.

Steele came out as a transwoman in 2021. “The biggest question when people come out of the closet is, ‘Will I still be loved’,” she says in their documentary Will & Harper. Ferrell and Steele undertake a road trip from New York to Los Angeles, as a way of coming out to America with Ferrell’s celebrity as a cushion against the slings and arrows of outrage. The road trip is also a way of strengthening the bond between them, to see what, if anything has changed.

The differences are there from the packing stage itself, where earlier as a man, she would pack a couple of tee-shirts, a pair of jeans and underwear, now Steele has a tough time just choosing the shoes to pack! After packing up the road trip essentials, which include, according to Steele, “chairs, a cooler and a natty beer,” the two set off from New York with a stop at SNL studios where they meet their former colleagues and friends including Tina Fey.

On the 16-day trip across America, they meet people in bars and gas stations. At The Grand Canyon, they meet a therapist who poignantly confesses to being unable to help a patient. They also meet Harper’s children and her sister, which has Ferrell asking them how they feel about Steele coming out. The long hours in the car let Ferrell ask Steele questions about dating, surgery and feelings of despair and joy.

There are conversations on how Steele chose her name (her mum went to school with Harper Lee) and how “a lot of transitioning is learning to accept yourself” which she does with some difficulty including her “low male voice”. Over the many miles, there is Ferrell’s tantrum to go to a Dunkin’ Donuts, doing laundry when clean underwear has almost run out, analysing comedy (which Steele hates to do), a joke involving Nordstrom Rack and getting beverage jackets for their beer cans, which have been christened Dolores and Cornelius.

While most are welcoming of the duo, the experience in Texas is not so pleasant. You have to, however, take the rough with the smooth, including karaoke to ‘I Got You Babe’ and trying the unicycle in Harper’s hometown, just like she used to do in her two years of Junior High. The only thing that takes you out of the film is the fact that it is all being filmed; so there is an artificiality to this very real documenting of an intensely personal journey.

At the end of the trip, as Ferrell and Steele sit on the beach, and Ferrell gives Steele a present that is a precious distillation of the journey, lines from ‘Harper and Will Go West’, the theme song Kristen Wiig, is tasked to come up with echo in the mind, “It takes 3,000 miles to get this close.”