What to do, what to do?
How about pretend to be someone else? Get dressed up, be silly, and get paid for it?
Val Kilmer has had a rather successful career doing just that. But this Hollywood actor’s life hasn’t been about money, it’s been about the things he doesn’t have. So don’t let Hollywood fool you: This is a true story that’ll tug at your heartstrings again and again.
One of the first things we learn is that this guy has always enjoyed capturing video. Thanks to thousands of hours of his own archived footage, we can see how he has acted (on and off screen) throughout the years. This was excellent raw material for the editors Ting Poo, Leo Scott, and Tyler Pharo (the former two of which also directed), and they’ve used it well. The years changed, but the man didn’t: He appears sensitive, humorous, and misunderstood since the beginning.
You could argue that this story is a pretentious self-advertisement. But I think you’d be wrong. There are too many genuinely tender and vulnerable moments here to think that this is born of pure self-aggrandizement. The way the man looks adoringly at his two grown children; the way he jokes with people; the way he speaks about his mother is likely to start your waterworks more than once.
So what actually happens? Well, we watch home movies of kid Val and his brothers making movies themselves; of young-adult Val on stages and movie sets; of middle-aged Val at home with the kids; of current-day Val doing something creative, while voice-over Val explains what we’re witnessing. These stories are the building blocks, and can teach us the power of storytelling; of seizures; of cancer.
These blocks create what Val would call the big picture: an explanation for his desire to act, to find the truth behind illusion and the illusion within truth. Though it sounds fanciful, these concepts are brought down to earth—heck, they never even leave it—because of how genuine everything laid before us seems to be.
Even the ways Val talks to us throughout the story—through past movies, in voice-over and addressing us in realtime—are poignant, and introduced in poignant ways. This movie is the work of many creative minds—and at the very least, one more than I had previously thought.