Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember review – a heartbreaking attempt to fight his dad’s dementia

Celebrities are forever taking their parents on televised road trips, and they’re usually cheap, easy commissions. Look how self-deprecating I am, says the famous person as they try to award themselves national treasure status by moving into light-factual programming: the person who knows me best is about to mildly embarrass me on holiday!

Be assured that Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember is a more serious endeavour. It features some intergenerational joshing as the guy from the Thor movies goes on a motorcycle ride with his old fella, but this is a journey filled with a wistful, desperate longing, towards a destination nobody can quite reach. Craig Hemsworth, 71, has early-stage Alzheimer’s. His mental faculties are starting to slip. But his boy is a Hollywood star, with the resources of a TV company behind him. Can he help?

Chris teams up with clinical psychologist Dr Suraj Samtani, who advises on how dementia breaks connections in the brain, and how the patient’s behaviour can slow that process down. Social interactions can forge new neural pathways, but the Hemsworths are particularly interested in what Samtani refers to as “practising retrieving memories from the past”. At home you might sing old songs or watch home movies; this is TV, where grander schemes are possible.

So Chris and Craig park their bikes, first, at the home on the outskirts of Melbourne where the Hemsworth kids spent their teens. They’re not just visiting: using an extensive library of family photos, the house has been painstakingly re-styled to look exactly as it did in the 1990s, from the sofas to the posters on Chris’s bedroom wall. Craig sparkles as he remembers making wooden planes for his boys, and how cold the place got in winter. He wants to share this immersive experience with Leonie, his wife of 44 years: “Where’s Leonie? She coming?”

Leonie is coming: she’s not on the motorcycle trip, but the producers are flying her to each location. “She’s coming, Dad.” Moments after being told this, Craig has what for him is a new thought: “Where’s Leonie? She coming?”

The look on Chris Hemsworth’s face when his father falters is heartbreaking: dementia is as devastating for the loved ones as it is for the patient, we’re reminded, as Chris spectates helplessly and Leonie breaks down in one of her interviews, suffering the slow-motion grief of losing someone who is losing their mind. And so, when father and son get back on their Harley-Davidsons to go further back in time at another former family home way up in Bulman, Northern Territory, the programme becomes as much about Chris as it is Craig.

Chris Hemsworth is a superhero on screen and generally a convivial presence off it, but his previous factual series, Limitless, revealed the vulnerable worrier beneath. There he took on extreme challenges designed to bolster wellness, including fighting ageing: he donned a weighted suit that mimicked elderly frailty and spent three days living in a retirement community. He knows he has the genes that make him likely to develop dementia himself. Although his dad’s condition in the present is of course his primary focus, Chris is concerned for his own future welfare.

But that’s not what is really at the heart of A Road Trip to Remember. Bulman is the proper outback, hours from the nearest town, where the little boy Chris enjoyed wild early years. Here was where Craig was at his extraordinary best, working as a buffalo wrangler alongside the local Indigenous community, wowing his son just as he would later in life as a professional motorcycle racer and, in a different way, as a child protection officer.

Craig was his son’s hero. A Road Trip to Remember becomes not just a programme about Chris’s horror at losing the Craig of today, but a moving treatise on his sadness at letting go, as every grownup must, of the person his parent used to be, the one who gave him his childhood. The sights and the smells of this part of the country feel, Chris says, “very comfortable, safe, [like being] taken back to a time when everything seemed far less complicated”.

The programme starts and ends with Chris holding up a cherished photograph, capturing a moment in the bush where Craig, looking eerily like Chris does now, is looking at his boy with all-consuming adoration. “I’d love to go back there,” says Chris, and they do visit that exact spot in the outback, but what Hemsworth really wants is to go back to the time in the photo, not just the place. All the money and science in the world can’t give you that.

Chris Hemsworth: A Road Trip to Remember is on Disney+ now.