To say that model and actress Anna Nicole Smith lived larger-than-life is an understatement. Filled with sex, ambition, drugs, scandal, and lawsuits galore, her story has colorful characters, mini-redemptions, and incredible calamity. Its American excesses, and the complexities of its multifaceted tragedy (she died in February 2007 at age 39, six months after the near-simultaneous birth of her daughter and the death of her 20-year-old son), check so many boxes of sociocultural intrigue that it’s no surprise numerous documentaries and no fewer than four films have unpacked her rise and fall.
That the latest effort to do so, Trust Me, I’m A Doctor, would be based on the memoir of Sandeep Kapoor, the doctor who once stood trial as a defendant in a prosecution alleging conspiracy in the events leading up to Smith’s death by prescription drug overdose, is somehow not shocking. Burdened with a pointless and erratic time-skipping structure and an equally bewildering and intrusive narration that occasionally breaks the fourth wall, Trust Me, I’m A Doctor is a generally ineffective and sometimes silly bauble.
Opening with a bit of interview footage with Smith (Abbie Cornish) that centers her desire for celebrity on par with her idol Marilyn Monroe, the film then cuts to the 2007 arrest of Kapoor (Kal Penn) in his parents’ home. After that, it flashes back to tell the story of how Kapoor came to first meet and treat Smith, and to slip quickly into a relationship that was atypical—and on the surface, inappropriate. (This is told via a much-discussed 2005 Gay Pride parade outing, which is indulged in a five-minute scene.)
Using a pre-trial discovery meeting with Kapoor’s lawyer Ellyn Garofalo (Linda Hamilton) as a loose framing device, Trust Me, I’m A Doctor introduces other characters in Smith’s life, including her live-in lawyer/business partner (and possibly more) Howard K. Stern (David Julian Hirsh), plus her son Daniel Wayne Smith (Jordan Kronis). As the story of Smith’s passing explodes on the internet, Kapoor finds his privacy ripped away. The latter half of the movie explores the trial and its impact on Kapoor, as he ponders having children via surrogate.
For a movie that just generally doesn’t emotionally connect, Trust Me, I’m A Doctor is surprisingly well-cast, and studded, if one squints just a little bit, with examples of talented supporting performers breathing smart, small moments of life into material that is otherwise flat and jumbled in its presentation.
As the somewhat enigmatic Stern, Hirsh really understands the assignment, injecting a baseline smarminess with the overriding nonchalance of a man simply used to getting his way by virtue of the deference granted his occupation. Elon Gold delivers a great impression of TMZ honcho Harvey Levin, whose outlet massively shaped public opinion on Kapoor. Al Sapienza, meanwhile, gives an engaging performance as California Medical Board Inspector Bob Dubbins, a bureaucrat suffering from main character syndrome who relishes viewing himself as a swaggering lawman. Kronis even brings a quiet, soft-eyed woundedness to Daniel, despite being saddled with dialogue like, “I recently met this girl and we started dating and I introduced her to my mom… and they started fucking each other behind my back.” Likewise, Penn and Hamilton escape harsh judgment, though it’s less that they succeed in crafting believably conflicted and three-dimensional characters, and more that you can see them, almost scene by scene, consistently making the least bad choice, given the material with which they have to work.
Some of the above characterizations risk making Trust Me, I’m A Doctor sound like it has a deliciously campy potential, which isn’t really the case at all. It’s just bad in conventional ways. The bulk of the blame rests squarely on writer-director Thane Economou’s inelegant adaptation, which too often feels like the filmic equivalent of going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole in click-through fashion, with tangentially related bits getting bumped to the top of the narrative irrespective of emotional relevance or coherence. This is most embodied in a sequence where Garofalo, having a mid-trial lunch with Kapoor, references a side character who claimed to have had an affair with Smith by saying, “Oh my God, can we do a quick sidebar on Frédéric Prinz Von Anhalt?” A full-on two-minute flashback ensues, notably not showing the character interacting at all with Smith.
Economou had a chance, no matter the style or confidence of Kapoor’s source prose, to examine the idea of moral complicity separate and distinct from legal guilt. Or reject that argument entirely. Instead, he largely avoids taking any stance, and his uncertainty is reflected in a variety of self-imposed problems—from the movie’s muddled structure to its inconsistent and confusingly deployed mixture of narration and direct-address. The result, despite Penn’s innate likability, is a character whom viewers can never really know, or care about.
Trust Me, I’m A Doctor has a couple solid ideas bubbling just under the surface—the notion that Kapoor’s attraction to Smith’s fame is perhaps informed by his financially comfortable but inherently unseen life as a closeted gay man—but no sense of how to meaningfully explore them. A more ambitious and honest film would have put its title character through the psychological ringer. The legal stakes here (a possible 10-year sentence) feel shockingly empty, and Kapoor’s inevitable revelation to his father regarding his sexuality, plus other bits that could give the movie greater depth (the loyalty of an older patient whose life Kapoor saves in a restaurant) never feel sincere, or really stick.
Other wrongheaded ideas abound, including a scene between Garofalo and Kapoor where the former repeatedly pauses and plays real-life footage of a press conference with California Attorney General Jerry Brown, while offering up strangely editorialized commentary (“He’s the closest thing we have to royalty in this state…”) on him. In fact, the movie’s entire technical package underscores its insubstantiality. While a handful of early compositions from cinematographer Bobby Shore communicate the idea of two different worlds with background action, the film is generally shot and staged (and certainly edited and scored) like an episodic offering, with a jittery energy used to occasionally goose the audience.
Still, Trust Me, I’m A Doctor isn’t bad in ways that invite much antipathy. But they do invite frustration, because it doesn’t seem to want to be taken particularly seriously, except in a few fitful moments when it does. More lost and confused than anything else, it’s a movie that shines no great new lights on either Smith or its orbiting subject.
Director: Thane Economou
Writer: Thane Economou
Starring: Linda Hamilton, Abbie Cornish, Kal Penn
Release Date: October 16, 2026
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