Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse.

This isn’t one of your regular documentaries. There are no talking heads, and it’s not blah-blah-blah and then he did this and then he did that and then his BMI got ridiculous, and so on. Instead, it is based on the hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes Brando made in his lifetime, which haven’t been heard until now, and which were uncovered by film-maker Stevan Riley, who wrote, directed and edited. (According to Riley, Brando preferred to speak his thoughts rather than write them down in diary form as he was severely dyslexic.) So, rather than a biography, it’s more a journey into Brando’s troubled mind (his own heart of darkness?) as he reflects, rages, despairs, questions, casts himself as victim (always), rejects the PR game — ‘I did not want to lie at the feet of the American public and let them enter my soul’ — and attempts to self-soothe.