Stevan Riley's "Listen to Me, Marlon," like its subject, is a bit unwieldy, cerebral, and at times pock-marked by bouts of profound sadness. And yet, it is difficult to take your eyes off of. More important, it is an honest descent into Brando's legacy on film and the culture - one that today is sorely lacking in genuinely compelling stars. Genius has always been lacking in popular culture - it is definitionally required to be so - but Brando haunts our age of instatalent like no one else. And so, Riley's film, drenched in the archival footage and newly discovered self-recordings of Brando, serves to haunt us for our misplaced vanities.
I watched "Listen to Me Marlon" last night in San Francisco's tightly packed "Little Roxie" Theater. The venue is from another time - level seating with the austere décor of a 1970s Soviet office building. But there they were, row after row of young people who could hardly have seen Brando perform in their own time. The film, not yet widely released across the country, nevertheless had them captivated, even as I calculated the number of years I was raising the median age of the audience (it was not a good number). Something about Brando remains timeless, and I suspect, Riley was more than wise in letting "Marlon" introduce himself to this new crowd of spectators.
It was all there - the heartbreaking childhood in Nebraska, the cutting jibes and violence of a hellish father; Brando's alcoholic mother, and then - the dramatic rise to fame, filled with Vesuvian sexual energy, mischaracterized love, and the slow, pounding fall from grace. Is this Brando or the story of America? The film is at its best in not making such pontifications - but let me free Riley from having to state the obvious and do it for him: Marlon Brando's life is the leitmotif of the aspired for American persona. That it leads to bloated sadness and a damned psyche is the Luciferian price most in this country would likely pay.
Having just read Stefan Kanfer's 2009 biography of Brando, I was struck by how much of the enigmatic Brando Riley was able to capture by his rich photography and carefully edited footage, pieced together over the course of Brando's life. Nobody looked quite like Marlon Brando, and yet, his voice - that soft and somehow sugar-crusted cadence (often a moan) is the star of the film. It conveys the angst of a man in search of truth, yet incapable of grasping it upon its discovery. So in life-sequence, Broadway becomes banal for Brando; Hollywood becomes a cheap whore; Tahiti devolves from a Paradise to a pile of broken dreams. It is hard to imagine a more successful life, at least in the conventional sense of the word - as we Americans imagine it, at least - becoming so ungainly and shattered.
But why were they looking - all those kids in the Roxie - what were they seeing in Brando? Not the loss, not the crematorium of wasted talent; they saw the rise. The sensual lips, the heroic push for racial justice, the fierce sexuality, and the sweep of fame purchased at a time when it had to be earned. Brando had to be Brando - look like him though he did, his talent had to carry him to those Icarian heights.
Walking out of the theater, it occurred to me that Brando's lines from On the Waterfront still hung, however obliquely over the culture. "I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender. I coulda' been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am." Brando's tragedy, was that he was wrong. He was somebody.
And it is our undying tragedy to wish for it too.
Saladin Ambar is an associate professor of political science at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he writes and teaches about American politics and society. He is the most recent author of Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era (Oxford University Press, 2014)