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aka Charlie Sheen Review
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.
