Brando’s career, too, spooled out between those two poles—an early burst of brilliance playing a series of majestically insolent rebels for Kazan, followed by a shadow-draped comeback for Coppola, as Corleone, the most famous patriarch in the history of movies. There is a great irony here, one that goes to the very heart of Brando and the secrets of screen performance. What happened in between—and after—those high points? Some critics have sensed an abyss of self-loathing, into which Brando fell, a figure of Wellesian tragicomedy fattened on burgers and fucking and unending disenchantment with the “lies” of the movie business. Not so fast, says Mizruchi. “The idea that Brando retreated immediately to Tahiti [after shooting The Godfather], where he drowned in the past and ate gluttonously, is unsupported by the facts,” she insists, with rather too much, perhaps, riding on that immediately. This is Brando viewed through an overly forgiving squint. Disdaining what she sees as previous critics’ “excessive emphasis on his romantic affairs,” Mizruchi relegates Brando’s experiments in free-form paternity to a series of parentheses and footnotes. Instead she gives us Brando with his nose buried in Camus and Baldwin—Brando the intellectual, thinker, and bibliophile whose book collection “outstripped those of most academics”; a “visionary” whose multicultural perspectives heralded our own.

From this view, some of the idealistic luster is restored to the series of films he made in the late 1950s and ’60s. Brando spotted “real prospects for educating the public” about fascism in The Young Lions, says Mizruchi. Mutiny on the Bounty presented a perfect opportunity for “pointing up the idiocy of protocol and our unnatural formality and our lies,” Brando said, and The Ugly American an equally unmissable chance to highlight American smugness and “make people alert about what is going on in the world.” The observer became quite the scold, locked in an admonitory Oedipal struggle not just with Hollywood and the audience but seemingly with America herself.

Mizruchi’s own pedagogic background—a professor of English at Boston University, she’s the author of The Rise of Multicultural America and Becoming Multicultural, among other books—may explain her blindness to just how fatal a didactic instinct is in an artist, let alone a film artist, let alone an actor. Too much of what she calls Brando’s “thinking” seems merely an addiction to ever more Olympian poses of superiority. The sententiousness reached a state of glorious, humming overload during the shooting of Apocalypse Now (1979). Brando turned up overweight, not having read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (his voracious reading stopped short of fiction, interestingly). Coppola had to shut down shooting for at least a week while the two of them, on a houseboat, came up with the film’s ending. Mizruchi does an admirable job of disentangling the skein of regurgitated dialogue that went into Brando’s improvisations. “You’re an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill,” Kurtz tells Willard, a reheat of Fletcher Christian’s characterization of the mission in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) as “a grocer’s errand.” Elsewhere, she catches echoes of “a confrontation at a concentration camp from The Young Lions (1958); a denunciation of reality from Last Tango in Paris (1972); and a strategy session on outwitting guerillas from Burn! (1969),” all swilling around in the Brando brain like sediment in wine. Coppola later recalled that when he suggested they explain away the weight gain by having Kurtz gorge himself on fruit, surrounded by girls, Brando said that he didn’t want to “portray himself that way”—an interesting slip. He was by this point beyond mere acting. If his early performances punched a hole in the screen through which the future of film performance seemed to flow—a kind of solipsistic naturalism paying mesmerized attention to the actor’s immediate sensory sphere—toward the end he threatened to capsize any movie he appeared in. The final reel of Apocalypse Now still makes less sense as the last stop on Coppola’s psychedelic trip into the Vietnam experience than as a vérité record of a movie star in the process of supernova implosion. Ultimately, the only way of being more “real” than everyone else is to stop acting altogether.