Netflix Doc Is Compelling, Then Tiring

Before Charlie Sheen makes his first appearance in Netflix’s new two-part, three-hour docuseries aka Charlie Sheen, Two and a Half Men star Jon Cryer pours more than a few grains of salt upon the entire endeavor.

“I had some trepidation about participating in this, partially because part of the cycle of Charlie Sheen’s life has been that he messes up terribly, he hits rock bottom and then he gets things going again — he brings a lot of positivity into his life and that’s when he burns himself out again. He just can’t help but set that house on fire,” Cryer observes.

Cryer, who is easily the most clear-eyed participant in the star-studded project, raises a point that’s impossible to shake for the duration: Is aka Charlie Sheen a manifestation of Sheen’s recovery or the latest phase of his addiction? Put a different way, is director Andrew Renzi doing something that’s contributing to Sheen’s health or enabling his sickness? Does it matter?

There isn’t going to be an obvious or immediate answer, and the truth is that many people won’t care either way, which raises a few more variations on those two questions: What does it mean to be “entertained” by Charlie Sheen’s journey at this point? If you “enjoy” aka Charlie Sheen, does that make you appreciably different from the ghoulish people who spent several months saying “Winning!” and making “Tiger blood!” jokes during Sheen’s last extended public meltdown? Is this a trainwreck masquerading as an instruction manual for maintenance of a particularly dangerous train? More concerningly, does Renzi know which is which? Even more concerningly, does it matter?

I found myself pondering these questions and feeling unsettled by how genuinely unsettled the documentary was making me. Like the sweep of Sheen’s life in micro, aka Charlie Sheen goes from fascinating to numbing, numbing to fascinating, sensational to desensitizing, and not always pleasantly.

It isn’t the least bit surprising that the Charlie Sheen who introduces himself to us in aka Charlie Sheen is a wry, honest raconteur of the highest level, because we’ve seen that version of Sheen several times over the five decades of his fame.

Sitting at a booth at what could be either a diner or a diner set — it’s actually Chips in Hawthorne, but it’s shot in a way that makes it not always feel real, adding to the doc’s artificiality/authenticity puzzle — Sheen talks Renzi through those decades of stardom and notoriety. 

With the frequently audible director alternating between frat boy giddiness and genuine concern at Sheen’s antics, the actor appears entirely in control, a product of seven years of professed sobriety. Unlike on his “Winning!” media tour, this Sheen is introspective and regretful in the moments he isn’t burnishing the legend of his various appetites, almost to the point that nothing feels spontaneous, putting the “canned” in “candor.”

He runs through the escalation of his drug usage, usually overlapping with aspects of his sex addiction, and although he isn’t as proud at the moment of this filming, he’s usually responding to previous interviews and confessions in which braggadocio was a defining characteristic. So what he’s selling here is contrast; he can still show how much he’s grown by being matter-of-fact about his crack consumption or the amount of money he spent on sex workers. In a documentary named after the contention that Charlie Sheen has always been a role Carlos Estevez inhabited, it doesn’t fully matter that this feels like a variation on that role — a melancholic Hamlet, rather than a manic Hamlet — instead of a full removal of a guise. 

All that matters and all that’s likely to matter to most viewers is that he announces at the beginning that nothing is off-limits, and when you reach the end, that’s the way it feels, even if it isn’t quite true. Renzi makes a big show of asking the full crew to leave the interview space for several questions of a particularly personal nature. It comes off, though, like Renzi is doing that for the audience’s benefit, since Sheen doesn’t suddenly become more comfortable in the allegedly more intimate setting. 

The “private” portion of the interview includes Sheen hastily shutting down one unpleasant recent accusation — and then dancing obliquely around what I assume journalistic aggregators will trumpet as the documentary’s biggest sexual revelation, rather than wondering why this is the one thing he wants to dance around. Renzi seems so pleased that Sheen is discussing this stuff at all that several seemingly necessary follow-up questions are never posed.

The documentary is built around the chat with Sheen — which gives the impression of stretching across many days, based on lighting choices — but Renzi has assembled an impressive assortment of key figures from Sheen’s lives. The biggest absences are father Martin Sheen and brother Emilio Estevez, so front and center in previous pieces of the Sheen saga. Charlie is quite gracious about wishing they would have spoken for the doc and understanding why they did not. Brother Ramon is guarded in a way that suggests he’s present in a representative capacity and not to give juicy quotes.

There is no such hesitation from ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, both self-aware about their participation — Richards says her goal is to keep this from being a “fluffy, glossed-over, sugar-coated piece of shit” — but offering poignant and sometimes unsettling details. Lifelong friends like Sean Penn and Tony Todd are there to be supportive. Heidi Fleiss is there, surrounded by parrots, to be less-than-supportive, since she justifiably still feels betrayed by the man she calls “a crybaby pussy bitch.” Cryer and Chuck Lorre are there to be magnanimous. 

In lieu of extended re-enactments, Renzi and his editing team emulate the technique that worked so well on Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, cobbling clips from Sheen’s scripted, film and TV work to recreate biographical details and, in the process, illustrate how autobiographical many of Sheen’s choices were. The approach is complemented by heavy use of the Estevez brothers’ childhood Super 8 movies, genre-bending DIY productions that Charlie notes often bore similarities to the movies their father was making at the time.

It’s in talking about his youth and reflecting on the influence of his father that Sheen is most relaxed and open, or maybe that’s where Renzi is just most interested. Sheen has great stories about the earliest stages of his career — like having to turn down the lead in Karate Kid or a hilarious sequence dedicated a televised showdown between Charlie & Martin and Michael Jordan — but then the stories become more drug-and-sex driven and thus more repetitive and exhausting.

Counterintuitively, I think that if Renzi had let Sheen talk for 30 minutes more about his professional life — yes, I’m asking for quality Eight Men Out stories, darn it — the documentary would have felt shorter (or faster-moving) because it would have seemed less monomaniacal. So much of Sheen’s narrative focuses on how he kept getting new opportunities even after he hit new levels of rock bottom, but it isn’t always clear why he kept getting those opportunities. 

Put a different way, Charlie Sheen has often lost the thread of what a talented actor Charlie Sheen once was and aka Charlie Sheen loses track of that reality as well, to the documentary’s detriment as a rounded portrait. Is Sheen an iconic actor who was a drug addict or an iconic drug addict who started off as an actor? It feels, especially in its second half, like aka Charlie Sheen is fixated on the latter, to the point where I went from captivated to exhausted. The doc isn’t exploitative, but its merit or lack thereof may be more evident in five or 10 years — as we see where it fits into the arc of Sheen’s life — than it was after three hours of watching.