It's called simply Brando - and why not? The name implies it all: the brute energy, the nasal, wayward rhythms, the hulking hurt.
But the title is the only thing that's simple about this documentary, the two-part, Turner Classic Movies-produced bio that debuted this week, scheduled to be rerun, and available through Turner on Demand.
Unlike other celeb bios, content to formulaically trace the graph of career with personal ups and downs as segues to commercial, TCM's Brando is a deeply psychological portrait, an earnest attempt to explain the essence of a complicated talent.
Yes, the conventional is there - such inevitabilities as explaining Brando's troubled childhood via his autobiographical improvisations in Last Tango in Paris - but in scant measure. Even the common Brando criticisms - the mumbling, the crudeness, the oblique-to-cruel humor - are hardly touched upon.
What we get instead is a Freudian diaspora, the multiply narrated tale of the cut-up son of an alcoholic mother and a hard-nosed father, whose diffused attention forever trapped their boy in love-hate relationships - with women, with acting, with the world.
Bred into him, then, was an instinct to simultaneously show-off in order to win attention and to call the loving cup awarded him a thing of cheap tin - the Oscar he received for The Godfather, for instance, which he refuted like the stolen racing trophy at the end of The Wild One.
It was a defining dissatisfaction that catapulted him to the forefront of two showbiz movements: the art of acting, which he advanced by breaking with the reigning methodology, and the evolution of the actor-as-advocate, born of his unease with the surrounding superficiality of his art and, as a career outsider, his sincere sense of kinship with the oppressed.
A lifelong fan of offbeat rhythms, this 3 hours on the analyst's couch with Brando moves to syncopated symphonia both generic and well-known - including Sonny Rollins' St Thomas - and features guest shrinks ranging from contemporaries - Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, Cloris Leachman - to disciples - Al Pacino, Dennis Hopper, Sean Penn.
Graphically, it is inexhaustibly varied, subscribing to the 2-D photographic style introduced in the Robert Evans bio The Kid Stays in the Picture and, through new touches, expanding the vocabulary of the moving collage.
Of particular interest to Classic Film fans are the moments of archival obscuria, from Kevin McCarthy's highly amusing home movies of he, Brando and Montgomery Clift hamming it up to Brando's little seen screen tests for Rebel Without a Cause and, thanks to Francis Ford Coppola's eight millimeter camera, The Godafther.
And if the second part seems more sentimental, that sentiment is genuine and beautifully expressed - particularly the scenic sequence in which Brando's Tahitian son takes us through the landscape upon which he and his father silently bonded.
Brando, in both life and art, tried hard to eschew labels. Wisely, the documentary that bears his name doesn't affix any; its concern instead is the all-too-human persona who struggled against the sticky straightjacket that they formed.
