“People get excited by trainwrecks,” Brooke Mueller, the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, observes in aka Charlie Sheen, a new Netflix documentary about the actor. “Unfortunately.” It may be unfortunate but it’s perhaps inevitable. After all, Netflix currently has nine documentaries – from “Balloon Boy” to “Poop Cruise” – available in a separate series called, sure enough, Trainwreck. The streamer understands, like no other broadcaster, the tabloid allure of a very public disintegration. Here, with aka Charlie Sheen, a two-part film, Netflix serves as both train conductor and crash investigator as the Sheen locomotive heads off the rails.
Charlie Sheen, born Carlos Estevez, grew up part of a dynasty. His father was Seventies heartthrob Martin Sheen and his elder brother, Emilio Estevez, was a core member of the “Brat Pack”, a group of actors who captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s. But young Charlie threatened to overshadow the whole clan after breakout performances in the likes of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Wall Street, and the 1986 Best Picture winner, Platoon. That early promise feels a distant memory now, after a long career marred by drug abuse, legal issues, and (perhaps most troubling of all) an eight-season stint on Chuck Lorre’s much-maligned sitcom, Two and a Half Men. It is a different tale to the classic Hollywood story of persistence, of not succeeding at first but trying and trying again. “But if at first you succeed,” Sheen muses, “what do you do?”
