sundance

Trailer: What would you do to reverse the aging process?

In YOUTH KNOWS NO PAIN, her upcoming semiautobiographical documentary, my friend Mitch McCabe takes a funny and highly personal look at the anti-aging industry. The film is populated by a number of odd, obsessive characters, including a plastic-surgery-obsessed housewife from Texas and guy in late middle age who, with the help of scalpels and a wardrobe change, has turned himself into a Jack Nicholson lookalike. Mitch, the 38-year-old daughter of a plastic surgeon, also explores her own complicated feelings about anti-aging techniques such as Botox and plastic surgery. Mitch’s ambivalent attitude toward the subject matter makes the film more compelling than a simple polemical expose would have been.

The film debuts on HBO on August 31.