Before podcasters and YouTube hosts, we had radio DJs. Older folks remember the sway certain DJs used to hold over their listenership before the advent of the internet and satellite radio. It’s harder to explain to anyone born after, let’s say, 1989. Younger people: Imagine if each major metro area had its own combination of MrBeast and Joe Rogan rolled into one. For a while, from roughly the late seventies through the mid nineties, Chicago radio station WLUP (“The Loop”) was a near-perfect crystallization of radio’s dominance in American life.
As an indicator of The Loop’s hold on the culture, it was the station behind the infamous Disco Demolition Night of 1979, a radio stunt-turned-riot from which disco’s popularity never really recovered. A few years later, shock jock Kevin Matthews joined WLUP as a morning DJ, and this is where the story of the documentary Broken Mary: The Kevin Matthews Story begins (in theaters October 7 only).
Broken Mary provides a moving overview of Matthews’ personal and professional life. Format-wise, the first half is a VH1 Behind the Music–style documentary about his tenure as Chicago’s clown prince of the airwaves. As portrayed, the anecdotes about his pranks and stunts have a real “you had to be there” quality to them, but from the footage and pictures shown, everyone involved—especially the legions of devoted fans he commanded who called themselves “Kev-heads”—seems to have been having a swell time. Yet even as he was breaking FCC rules and inciting NFL players to duct tape him to a chair, Matthews remained what he calls a “zombie Catholic,” still going through the motions. This tension between his on-air shock jock persona and the latent faith of his childhood was on display in the charity golf tournaments he used to host. His heart was in the right place, but the chaotic fundraisers featured strippers, food fights, and property damage, to the point that hardly any money went to the actual beneficiaries after the injured parties had been paid off.
But anyone who has seen Behind the Music knows that what goes up must come down. Despite a Rolodex of celebrity contacts, by the 2010s, a changing radio landscape and a multiple sclerosis diagnosis had all taken their toll on Matthews’ career.
He began to turn to the faith of his own troubled childhood, but he still couldn’t bring himself to look at a statue of Mary. “When you have women parachuting out of a plane in a bikini,” Matthews says, “And then you see purity like that. It’s like, ‘No, I can’t do that.’” But after going to confession (his first since the fourth grade), he was able to look at the Blessed Mother again. And after a chance encounter with a broken Mary statue he found lying on the ground near a dumpster, during which he said he heard Jesus ask him, “Will you deny me? Will you deny my mother?” Matthews took her into his home.
Matthews’ honesty about his own brokenness led him to a joy he is now urgently sharing with anyone who will listen . . .
He cleaned up the statue, but kept the brokenness, the cracks, and the missing hands. “She reminds me of me,” Matthews said. “I was garbage. I’ve got MS. I’m busted, I’m broken.” For the first few years, he likens his relationship with the statue to the one Tom Hanks’ character had with the volleyball Wilson in the movie Cast Away, a mute companion chatted with throughout the day.
But a priest friend encouraged Matthews to put his name recognition and comedic gifts to use to tell the story of his conversion, and to bring the statue with him. The second half of Broken Mary tells the story of how the former DJ went from being the headliner to “Mary’s roadie.”
As he began going out and telling his story, Matthews discovered he had one more Chicagoland stunt left in him: the Hope for the Broken procession on May 31, 2019. Having shut down four lanes of traffic, he processed down Chicago Avenue with Broken Mary and thousands of others, all praying for the healing of the city. “She went from a dumpster to a bed of roses being carried by police and firemen,” Matthews said.
He still travels with the statue, which he calls Our Lady of the Broken, to parishes around the country. The last part of the documentary doesn’t feature Kev-heads, but people telling their own stories of healing from their encounters with Matthews and his statue and, through them, Mary and her Son. “It’s not about me,” Matthews says in a parish talk shown in the film.
Although he’s not the icon he once was, Matthews still uses his talent of relating to people in service of another greater icon: the Virgin Mary. Through her, he now magnifies God’s glory instead of his own. Where once he did comedy as a way to deflect from his own personal trauma and to make people laugh, now he addresses crowds to do something more important: to instill hope. “Do I get standing ovations?” he says near the film’s end. “No, Mary does. God does. Jesus does.”
Six years on, Chicago is still broken, and as Matthews reminds his audience in the film, “We’re all broken.” But the surprising trajectory of his own life shows that God can troll with the best of them. Broken Mary depicts how Matthews’ honesty about his own brokenness led him to a joy he is now urgently sharing with anyone who will listen, people who desperately need to hear it. The testimonials from individuals who have encountered him and his statue remind viewers that miraculous spectacles like the Hope for the Broken procession are not ends in themselves but calls to radical conversion. Kevin Matthews—and his broken Mary—teach us that the path to hope is one of humility.