The Strange, Cinematic Life of Charlie Sheen

“I feel there’s so many tales and pictures ingrained in individuals’s minds concerning the idea of me,” the actor Charlie Sheen tells the digicam within the new two-part Netflix documentary about his life, “aka Charlie Sheen.” “It’s not even like they consider me as an individual. They consider me as an idea, or a particular second in time.” This evaluation, although in all probability true of superstar figures generally, strikes me as particularly apt in Sheen’s case, if solely due to his fidelity in our media panorama over the previous 4 a long time. Particularly to a viewer in her late forties, resembling myself, it appears that evidently Sheen has at all times been round: a show-business soldier by no means removed from the attain of a digicam, able to embody a temper or an period.Within the nineteen-eighties, when Sheen was in his early twenties, he adopted his father, Martin Sheen, and his older brother Emilio Estevez into the household enterprise, because the main man in Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” and “Wall Road,” every position some model of a younger, go-getting buck. Within the aughts, he turned Hollywood’s highest-paid male TV actor when he starred on the blockbuster sitcom “Two and a Half Males”—taking part in a bacchanalian bachelor immediately saddled with fraternal and avuncular obligations—a cheering if considerably bland mainstay of the George W. Bush years. And, in between these high-profile gigs, there at all times seemed to be some diverting, although usually middling, Sheen fare to amuse audiences. (His IMDb web page lists a staggering eighty-six performing credit, amongst them choices like “Scary Film 3” and “Main League II.”)Largely, nevertheless, what grabbed the general public’s consideration over the a long time have been the scandals Sheen was concerned in: the arrests for medication and for assault; the rehab stays; the liaisons with porn stars and prostitutes; the short marriages and the even faster divorces; and, in fact, within the early twenty-tens, the frenzied interval during which, after being fired from “Two and a Half Males,” Sheen overtly embraced his position as a proudly drugs-and-sex-obsessed insurgent with “tiger blood” pulsing via his veins, touring the nation with a retinue of grownup actresses to proclaim his rejection of well mannered society’s pieties, and braying the catchphrase “Successful!” at seemingly anybody and everybody he got here throughout.The professed purpose of “aka Charlie Sheen,” directed by Andrew Renzi, is to offer viewers a peek on the particular person behind the persona. This coördinated push arrives accompanied by a memoir, “The Ebook of Sheen,” printed a day earlier than the documentary dropped. “The stuff that I plan on sharing, I made a sacred vow years in the past to solely divulge to a therapist,” the actor tells the digicam. In different phrases, it’s revelation and introspection time for Sheen, who, at sixty, has now been sober for eight years. However, as I watched, I felt that although the collection actually delivered on its promise of revelation, there wasn’t practically as a lot introspection, leaving the viewer with a way not of a deeper understanding and connection however of glimpsing, from a distance, at a life made virtually fully of the “tales and pictures” that Sheen claims to wish to get previous.In a means, although, that is completely becoming. It shouldn’t be shocking that Sheen himself sees his life as a mediated one, contemplating the surroundings he grew up in. When he was eleven, he joined his father within the Philippines on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam Struggle masterwork, “Apocalypse Now” (during which Martin Sheen performed the beleaguered Captain Willard), and, influenced by the sights and sounds he skilled, turned more and more focused on making dramatic and violent Tremendous 8 films at his household’s Malibu dwelling alongside along with his siblings, in addition to their pals from the neighborhood, like future actors Chris and Sean Penn. “We form of grew accustomed to watching our father die on movie,” he says. “We acknowledged early on that these form of plotlines are compelling.” One other compelling plotline emerged for Sheen within the early eighties, when Estevez rose to fame as a member of the so-called Brat Pack. Dazzled by his older brother’s newfound standing as a media sensation, Sheen determined to strive performing, too, and was instantly enchanted by the cinematic qualities of being a star. (In his memoir, he remembers going to see a packed screening of “Platoon” with a Penthouse Pet named Lisa: “Strolling together with her on my arm previous the fired-up catcalling line that circled the block was like being in a film on the way in which to the film.”)Unsurprisingly, Sheen wasn’t the one one to expertise his life as if in a film; practically everybody in his orbit, too, seen him, not less than initially, as an idea somewhat than an individual. Denise Richards, his second spouse and the mom of two of his daughters, tells the digicam that she first encountered him as a teen whereas watching “Platoon” together with her dad, a Vietnam vet. (“Would you ever have thought . . . that I’d marry that fucking man?” she asks). Brooke Mueller, Sheen’s third spouse and the mom of his twin sons, additionally knew him because the “sizzling soccer stud” she noticed him play onscreen, within the film “Lucas.” (Sheen’s usually indistinguishable ubiquity as an actor is hinted at, amusingly, when Mueller tells the digicam that as a younger lady, she loved her future husband’s efficiency in “Soiled Dancing,” solely to be reminded by Renzi that Sheen didn’t even have an element in that film.) This hall-of-mirrors impact—of a life represented greater than lived—is emphasised within the documentary by the frequent insertion of clips from Sheen’s varied performances in movie and TV, usually alongside Richards or Martin Sheen, that are used as an instance the real-life, offscreen tales Sheen is recounting.