Charlie Sheen as he appears in Netflix's two-part documentary Aka Charlie Sheen.

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Celebrity self-portrait documentaries have always been a puzzling subgenre that tends to offer more than it can actually deliver when it comes to genuine displays of humanisation. While most purport to be revealing and candid reflections of a famous subject, they often amount to disjointed pieces of a story, from which we never get a full sense, at least not an objective one.

Such is the case in Aka Charlie Sheen, Netflix’s exhausting two-part documentary directed by Andrew Renzi, which sees the former Two And A Half Men star open up about his ugly public truths — his drug addiction, wild lifestyle, the public spectacles, his disastrous fall from TV grace — and others he’s yet to speak on until now.

The film, split into two 90-minute parts, is filled with unflinching revelations about Sheen’s colourful past that started making headlines before it even premiered. Publications have already rounded up the juiciest and most salacious tidbits revealed because they know that’s exactly what people are tuning in for.

It’s understandable why the documentary is currently the No. 1 movie on Netflix in some territories. That’s just the world we live in now. The metric isn’t a measure of how well put together Aka Charlie Sheen actually is, but rather what piques audiences’ interest these days, which, in Sheen’s case, happens to be the darkest aspects of his life and career that he’s still living in the shadow of.

But that’s just one issue with his documentary. The other is what many celebrity docs that feature their subject often suffer from: the inability to relinquish control.

While Sheen isn’t credited as a producer on his film, he appears to steer the narrative as if he were one. A question Renzi poses at the top of Part 1 suggests so, as he curiously asks the actor: “How do you imagine structuring the story of Charlie Sheen?” Sheen then breaks it down into three neat sections: “Partying, partying with problems and then just problems.”

That’s aso pretty much how the doc is organised, which says a lot about what Renzi — and Sheen — want us to know about the actor at this point in his life, now eight years sober and on a path toward self-forgiveness, by his own account.

To the director’s credit, several figures in Sheen’s life........

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