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Before this film I had never heard of Joyce McKinney and her bizarre headline grabbing life. It's a fitting statement of her bizarre story, one that grabs attention and fizzles out as the next sensational tale takes hold of the headlines of magazines and newspapers at the check-out line. It's got it all -- a former beauty queen, a Mormon missionary, violence and kinky sex.

Joyce McKinney was in search of that special guy her whole life. After living in L.A. for a stretch, she moved to Utah where she meet Kirk Anderson. For Joyce it was love at first sight. The problem for Kirk was that he was a Mormon and was expected to marry a nice Mormon girl. Not a former Miss Wyoming. Kirk up and left on his required mission without telling Joyce where he was going. She hired a private investigator to hunt him down, believing he had been kidnapped and brainwashed by a cult.

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I became a fan of comedian Bill Hicks when I caught one of his old HBO specials on late at night. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of this angry hilarious and provocative performer before, so I went to the Internet and looked him up. Turns out he has a highly influential comedian of the early ‘90s who on the cusp of breaking into the big time in the U.S. died at the age of 32. Now British filmmakers Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas have brought his story to film in this innovative documentary that combines archive footage and animation to bring Hicks’ story to life.

Bill Hicks started his career as a comedian while in high school. He and his friend Dwight Slade snuck out of their houses to audition for the new comedy club in Houston, Texas. By the time he moved to L.A. after graduating, he was already a veteran. At 19, he was playing the famed Comedy Store and was getting meetings with agents to pitch comedy scripts. But for the eager artist success wasn’t coming fast enough and the City of Angels wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be, so he returned to Houston, where he made a name for himself not only as a comedian, but as a man living on the edge.