Val (2021) review

Career retrospective - more or less - of American actor Val Kilmer, going from his days at Juilliard to working on major Hollywood blockbusters (Top Gun, Willow, The Doors, Tombstone, The Island of Dr. Moreau, etc.) to playing Mark Twain on stage (a pet project) ... and now he's struggling to speak (and breathe) because of throat cancer.  Much of the footage was shot by Kilmer himself - he's been an obsessive chronicler of his own life, which grants the audience some rare archival material from the 80's - and he says it's a documentary about "being an actor," but it's really something of a tragedy: he was a serviceable performer with a movie poster face, but he never had the level of talent he thought he had, and his being labelled "difficult to work with" - which the documentary acknowledges but doesn't investigate - came from him trying to be "a perfectionist" on set.  With him as one of the producers - and his son Jack providing voice over - you weren't going to get an objective portrayal of the man, but you will get "pitiable" shots of him "degrading himself" by signing autographs at Comic Con and close-ups of him pulling what looks like tissue paper out of his nose and ears.  That comment about John Frankenheimer not being able to direct might have been appropriate in the moment, but Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate and The Train prove otherwise.