Biography: Sean Penn - award-winning actor, activist, ex-husband of Madonna - what makes him tick? His friends and peers give their opinion in Richard Kelly's authorised biography to produce an altogether one-sided picture writes Kevin Sweeney.
What makes Sean Penn tick like a time bomb? One thing his admirers and detractors would say: through it all - through the sensational performances in largely non-commercial films, through the wacky marriage to the Material Girl, the boorish slugfests with paparazzi, the 60 days in the slammer while on probation, through close, puzzling friendships with American oddities such as underground poet Charles Bukowski and convicted traitor-to-his-country Andrew Daulton Lee, through to responsible fatherhood, an Academy Award and a courageous anti-war activism - Sean Penn has always done things his way.
Not that you'll find anyone badmouthing Penn in this authorised "oral biography"; if they're out there, they weren't canvassed for their views by author Richard Kelly. Instead, some 70 loyal family, friends and colleagues were interviewed, ranging from Hollywood superstars (Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Woody Allen) to Tinseltown oddballs (Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton), along with thoughtful and generally articulate contributions from Penn himself. The observations are weaved together to form a profile that is ultimately absorbing and even touching, despite the occasional luvvy crawling from lesser lights.
One gets the sense that Penn finds flattery embarrassing. And, for the reader, pointless, since his life and career are interesting enough, and his acting and directing achievements more than stand on their own.
Penn was born in 1960 to performers: his mother, Eileen, was a Broadway actress; his father, Leo, a decorated tail-gunner on a bomber during the second World War, had gained some traction in Hollywood when he ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. Leo found stage work in New York, where he met his wife, and in the 1960s began a modest career as a television director.
Leo Penn was a "real stand-up guy, a real American", recalls theatre director Art Wolff, who directed Sean on Broadway to acclaim in Heartlands (1981). "And part of why Sean is so down on Hollywood is because of the way his father was treated, and then their pretending it never happened."
After some minor television work, Penn made his feature film début in Taps (1981), which starred Timothy Hutton, hot off Ordinary People, as a student cadet leading a standoff against the military. In what, in retrospect, seems like inspired casting, Penn played the conscientious, level-headed chum to Tom Cruise's kill-crazy nutjob. His starring début came the following year with Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as good-natured pothead Jeff Spicoli - a beloved characterisation in what has turned out to be one of his few popular films.
It's a sign of the respect Penn commands in the industry that in the last two decades he has been invited to work with directors as diverse as Louis Malle (Crackers), John Schlesinger (The Falcon and the Snowman), Dennis Hopper (Colors), Brian De Palma (Casualties of War and Carlito's Way), Neil Jordan (We're No Angels), Tim Robbins (Dead Man Walking), David Fincher (The Game), Woody Allen (Sweet and Lowdown), Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line), Alejandro González Iñárritun (21 Grams) and Clint Eastwood (Mystic River).
He's also written and directed three downbeat, resolutely personal dramas, two of them starring good friend Jack Nicholson, and contributed the US episode to the September 11th portmanteau 11'09'01.
If there have been few box-office blockbusters in the filmography, neither have there been many truly wretched credits. The worst is easily the infamous Shanghai Surprise (1986), an adventure-comedy debacle co-starring then-spouse Madonna. Of the experience, Penn says: "I was drunk a lot. It was torture. Torture.
Oh yes, Madonna. After proper earlier romances with Elizabeth McGovern and Bruce Springsteen's kid sister, Pamela, Penn attained a permanent position in the tabloids with his tumultuous two-year marriage to the queen of pop. Christopher Walken approvingly describes their Malibu wedding, on a tented tennis court which was strafed by paparazzi in helicopters, as "almost like a Fellini atmosphere". But friend Meegan Ochs could see the warning signs while they were still dating in the hot glare of photographers' flashbulbs ("She was someone running at the limelight and he was running away from it"), while director James Foley observed that an unhappy Penn became "so much more famous for his marriage rather than his acting".
Penn's long, sometimes fractious relationship and seemingly solid marriage to actress Robin Wright appears to have brought this moodiest of men a measure of happiness, as well as two children. After his daughter, Dylan, was born, he says: "I found I was looking at the world in a new way: you start looking beyond your own lifetime."
In October, 2002, Penn spent $56,000 on an eloquent open letter to George W. Bush in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post, in which he implored Bush to avoid war with Iraq. This was followed by a fact-finding trip to Iraq in December and, after the war began, a harsher open letter to the New York Times in May, 2003. And last December he returned to Iraq as part of a delegation that included parents of US soldiers. Despite predictably hysterical criticism from the Rupert Murdoch media empire, earlier this year Penn was honoured by his peers with an Oscar for Mystic River (his fourth nomination).
From these moving personal and professional highs, the book also details some of Penn's more imbecilic, if mildly amusing, moments, such as the time he drove 800 miles to New Orleans to meet Sister Helen Prejean, the inspiration for Dead Man Walking. Except he stopped in North Carolina and took seven hits of acid with Don Henley of The Eagles "and went f**ken crazy for thirty-five straight hours". There's also the time he was hanging out at his trailer in the Hollywood hills with Jewel and some friends. Jewel was singing some of the songs that would soon make her famous when Penn spotted a rat that had been irritating him. "In the middle of a sugary-sweet Jewel ballad," recalls a friend, "blam! A shot goes off." "Hollywood bad boy" Penn had shot the rat in half with a laser-sighted 9mm Glock pistol.
Kevin Sweeney is an Irish Times journalist.
Sean Penn: His Life and Times. Richard T. Kelly, Faber and Faber, 472pp. £16.99