Released in select theaters last week, Louis C.K.’s film Fourth of July is the director and comic’s first feature since 2017, when, at the height of the #MeToo movement, the New York Times revealed that he’d sexually harassed at least five women over the years, most of them fellow comedians. American celebrity culture feeds on stories of impossible ascents and epic falls. To kill a king is even more pleasurable than to anoint one. In the days after the scandal broke, critics who’d previously hailed C.K. as a master savaged him with equal fervor. After admitting to the accusations publicly, he went into self-imposed exile in Europe and didn’t record a new special for two years.