Review: Al Pacino memoir ‘Sonny Boy’ goes all in with swagger, sorrow and why he skipped the ’73 Oscars

Al Pacino grew up running the streets of the South Bronx with his buddies, getting into whatever trouble might present itself. In his new memoir, “Sonny Boy,” he calls his little crew “a pack of wild, pubescent wolves with sly smiles,” and describes how his three best friends, Cliffy, Bruce and Petey, eventually died of heroin overdoses. Pacino would confine his junkie life to the screen, in his 1971 breakout performance in “The Panic in Needle Park.” He would be the first to tell you that he was saved by art.

Throughout this discursively soulful book runs a series of interconnected questions: Why did I make it when so many others didn’t? Why can’t I just practice my craft and leave the stardom and celebrity part out of it?

Voted most likely to succeed in junior high school, he considered the insignificance: “All it meant was that a lot of people had heard of you. Who wants to be heard of anyway?” And, a bit later: “At a certain point, dealing with fame is a self-centered problem and one should probably keep their mouth shut about it. Here I am talking about it now, so I’m starting to feel I should keep my mouth shut too.” Thankfully, he has too much to say to follow through.

Al Pacino’s new memoir, “Sonny Boy,” delves into his troubled youth, quick ascent onto Hollywood’s A-list and sometimes questionable career choices that followed.

(Penguin Random House)

Now 84, Pacino, who wrote “Sonny Boy” with arts journalist and author Dave Itzkoff, doesn’t really have to worry about offending the person who might get him his next job. He describes creative beefs he had with directors, including Norman Jewison (“And Justice for All”) and Arthur Hiller (“Author! Author!”). A caption accompanying a photo of a hysterical Pacino in “Justice” reads: “I want off this film!”

But kiss-and-tell gossip isn’t really Pacino’s métier. He comes across as a New York theater actor fiercely devoted to the mysteries of the craft, high on the poetry (and, for a long while, booze and drugs), and reluctant to embrace the high profile that followed the star-making success of “The Godfather” in 1972. Never terribly practical, he walked away from movies for a few years in the ’80s — “I began to question the very essence of what I was doing and why I was doing it” — and went broke in 2011, writing, “I had fifty million dollars, and then I had nothing.”

Because he’s now so familiar from so many movie roles, you can almost hear him saying all of this in recognizably Pacino-like tones — the righteous hipster cop of “Serpico” (1973), or the slickly ravenous real estate shark of “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992). This is part of why we gravitate toward movie stars, even those who would rather be something else. We feel like we know them. Pacino has done such a high volume of great work, including the “Godfather” movies, “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Scarface” (1983), “Sea of Love” (1989), “The Insider” (1999) and “The Irishman” (2019), that reading “Sonny Boy” often feels like hanging out within a history of American movies over the last 50 years.

It can also leave one wanting more about particular favorites. Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” to my mind among the best films of the last half century, receives barely a mention. “Glengarry” gets short shrift as well. Come on, Al. Always Be Closing.

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But the eccentricity of “Sonny Boy” is part of its charm, and the book’s distinctive voice speaks to a fruitful collaboration between Pacino and Itzkoff, the first person Pacino thanks in his acknowledgments: “His considerable help and persistence got me to turn corners I never would have turned.”

These pages contain sorrow, for Pacino’s largely absent father and severely depressed mother, for his late boyhood friends, for the poverty and uncertainty that marked his youth. There is also the jolt of discovery, as when a theater troupe came to the 15-year-old Pacino’s favorite movie theater to perform Chekhov’s “The Seagull” and lighted a fire under him. “Chekhov became a friend of mine,” writes Pacino, who was known to wander the New York streets reciting his favorite theatrical monologues at the top of his lungs.

Pondering the fate of his friends who died by the needle, he asks: “Why didn’t I end up that way? Why am I still here? Was it all luck? Was it Chekhov? Was it Shakespeare?” He all but answers the question elsewhere, when he considers the aspiring actors who ask why he made it while they didn’t: “You wanted to. I had to.”

If industry talk is more your thing, Pacino tries to oblige. He writes that he just recently heard a longstanding rumor, that he didn’t attend the Oscars in 1973 because he was nominated for supporting actor rather than lead actor, for “The Godfather.” He offers a much simpler explanation: He was terrified. “It explains a lot of the distance I felt when I came out to Hollywood to visit and work,” he writes. It might also help explain why he didn’t win his first (and only) Oscar until 1993 for “Scent of a Woman,” in which he gave a performance nowhere near his best. (He has been nominated nine times.) He touches on his various Hollywood romances, among them Jill Clayburgh, Tuesday Weld, Diane Keaton and Marthe Keller. Pacino, by his own admission, is an obsessive workaholic, a habit that hasn’t done him many favors away from the screen and stage. He does come across as a devoted father to his three children.

“Theater people are vagabonds, wandering gypsies,” he writes. “We are people on the run.” And for all of his movie stardom, Pacino makes it clear that he is, at heart, a theater person. The two-time Tony Award winner is an artist who happens to have the career of a celebrity. He makes a convincing case for himself as an outsider who crashed the party, driven forward by the work above all. Is this a self-serving portrayal? Perhaps. But most celebrity memoirs are. At least “Sonny Boy” is also shot through with what certainly feels like self-deprecating honesty to go with the well-worn Pacino swagger.