109 min | R | July 23, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Val Kilmer has filmed himself his entire adult life. Now throat cancer has taken his speaking voice, so his son reads the words while decades of old tape tell the story. A movie star edits his own life and decides which parts you get to see.
Val Kilmer has shot home video for his entire adult life. Thousands of hours of tape spill out of sets, auditions, hotel rooms, and his own childhood backyard. Throat cancer has stripped his speaking voice down to a rasp forced through a tracheostomy tube. The film assembles his footage into a self-portrait narrated by his son, who reads Kilmer’s written words in a voice close enough to the original to ache. This is a documentary about a famous actor. It is also about a man building the last performance he can still control.
Kilmer is the only subject, and he appears as himself across three versions. There is the young actor mugging for the lens with total confidence. There is the leading man on the sets of Top Gun and Tombstone and The Doors, cataloging his own ambition on tape. There is the present-day Kilmer, hauling an oxygen tank through fan conventions and signing photographs of a face that no longer matches his. Jack Kilmer narrates his father into being, and the substitution of son for father turns the film into an act of inheritance. Mercedes Kilmer enters as a daughter watching her father work, and Joanne Whalley surfaces in the archival footage as the wife the camera could not hold onto.
Leo Scott and Ting Poo direct from decades of degraded videotape, and their work is at its core an act of editing. They cut between formats and eras so that the grain of each image dates the memory it carries. The handheld camcorder footage holds a different weight than the present-day digital photography that follows Kilmer through his sickness. Kilmer writes the narration himself, and the voiceover does the heavy lifting his ruined speaking voice cannot. The sound design lingers on the mechanical hiss of the trach valve, which makes every word he forces out aloud cost something. The structure refuses chronology and drifts the way memory does.
The film is most honest when it is least flattering. Kilmer the editor controls the frame, and that control is also the limit. The reputation for being difficult, the marriages, and the wreckage of the middle years pass by in soft focus while the triumphs and the illness get the full treatment. This is a self-portrait, and self-portraits flatter their subjects even when they confess. What survives the curation is real. A man who built his identity on his face and his voice loses both and keeps filming anyway.