In ‘Confessions of a Good Samaritan,’ Penny Lane - and her kidney - take center stage

The ace documentarian, who told the stories of Satanists and Kenny G, turns the camera on herself and her quest to donate a kidney.

Documentarian Penny Lane has made some pretty outstanding documentaries over the years. 

In 2013’s Our Nixon, she assembled archival footage of the former president. In 2016’s Nuts!, she looked back at the story of a quack doctor who did weird medical experiments with goat testicles. In 2019’s Hail Satan?, she went into the Flying Spaghetti Monster-style schtick of The Satanic Temple. In 2021’s Listening to Kenny G, she sat with the much-debated musician and examined his divided legacy- delivering one of my favorite music documentaries of recent years.

Now, in her new film Confessions of a Good Samaritan, Lane’s subject is… herself. Or rather, her decision to donate one of her kidneys. The film also provides a comprehensive history of kidney donation and various ethical questions raised by the practice. 

Lane is a compelling documentary subject, so much so that I cared more about her journey and story than the background material. The filmmaker, who doesn't appear on camera in most of her films, isn’t shy about showing herself at vulnerable moments, including the surgery and its immediate aftermath. She also shares the contemporaneous personal notes she took throughout the process. 

Lane also clarifies that this is no Supersize Me-style gimmick: she did not donate the kidney to make a film about it. 

(And yes, as she has made pains to make clear for years, Penny Lane is her real name. It’s not an homage to the Beatles, Almost Famous, or anything else; it’s the woman’s given name. Her website is even pennylaneismyrealname.com)

The vast majority of people who donate a kidney do so to a family member or another loved one. (And yes, there was a Curb Your Enthusiasm arc when Larry was asked to donate a kidney to Richard Lewis.) 

But Lane did something different: She made what’s known as an “altruistic” or “undirected” kidney donation, which isn’t meant for someone she knows or even anyone in particular. 

The world has a lot of people — more than 100,000 just in the U.S. — who need a kidney and risk death without one, and most healthy people have one kidney to spare. So that problem could be solved if more people agreed to give away a kidney. However, doing so is an elective and invasive process that not many people are eager to do. And when they do, their friends and loved ones often wonder what they’re thinking. 

Do you remember the “Bad Art Friend” discourse? It was just over a year ago, but it feels like way longer. It was a dispute between two women who were writers, in which one of them went through an undirected kidney donation and decided to make having done so their entire personality, leading up to a feud when the other writer mined the story in her writing. 

Lane’s story doesn’t ever devolve into that sort of drama, although it’s compelling on its own as the way her film interrogates her relationship with her altruism. 

The film also spends much time looking at the history of kidney transplants. Did you know that there was a time when only identical twins were allowed to donate kidneys to one another? There are some bizarre local news stories about people announcing their intention to make altruistic kidney donations, with their spouses threatening to divorce them over it. There’s an even weirder news story about a guy who complained that he wasn’t allowed to bring a life-sized cutout of Donald Trump to his kidney dialysis treatments.

There’s also some discussion about the thorny question of whether the actual selling of kidneys, long both illegal and ethically frowned upon, should be rethought. There’s even old footage of Al Gore, of all people, testifying against it. 

If the film has a flaw, it spends too much time on all this while breaking away from Lane’s story. 

These events happened in 2018, so it’s been a while, and we’ve also been awaiting this film for a while. Confessions of a Good Samaritan premiered at South by Southwest in the spring of 2023, over a year ago — and also made stops at festivals like IFF Boston and PFS Springfest in Philly — and finally arrives in theaters this Friday through a deal with fledgling distributor Sandbox Films. 

It’s another Penny Lane film about a strange corner of the human condition.