Val Review: Batman Beyond

That's what a lot of "Val" feels like, intimate home movies, albeit ones that just happen to feature Sean Penn, Kurt Russell, Kevin Bacon, and other stars, forever crystallized in the prime of their superstardom. But not only does Kilmer have a treasure trove of footage featuring Penn and Bacon mooning the camera, but he also presents behind-the-scenes footage of "Norm," the lookalike brought in to the legendarily disastrous 1996 film "The Island of Dr. Moreau." Kilmer took the part to act alongside his hero Marlon Brando, but Brando's overbearing presence quickly got the "On the Waterfront" legend ushered off set for large periods of time, leaving Kilmer to act with ... well, Norm.

The unflinching "Val" has Kilmer addressing long-simmering allegations that he's "difficult to work with," his argument essentially boiling down to a love of the craft and insistence that collaborators treat it with respect. The old clips portray an actor who yearns to act, but too often finds himself wearing batsuits. To bolster his case, he puts in audio footage of an on-set argument with "Moreau" replacement filmmaker John Frankenheimer (who was also threatening to quit), and looks back on 1995's "Batman Forever" saying: "Every kid dreams of becoming Batman. Nobody should dream of playing him in a movie."

Kilmer walks the viewer through his acting background (he was the youngest person ever accepted into the Juilliard drama division at the time) and subsequent stage career, leading to an unlikely film debut in 1984's Abrams-Zucker-Abrams cult classic "Top Secret!" — a film he claims to still not understand. Kilmer took the role so seriously, he spent months learning to play guitar, but when he showed up to set, the directors told him it was funnier when he pretended he didn't know how to play. As it turns out, the anecdote would be a microcosm for his time in Hollywood.

We see the heartbreakingly desperate audition tape Kilmer made for films like "Full Metal Jacket" (he even flew to London to try and hand-deliver it to director Stanley Kubrick), interspersed with him on set, goofing around in trailers with his "Top Gun" and "Willow" co-stars. On the latter, he would find the love of his life, actor Joanne Whalley, to whom he was married from 1988 to 1996.

Kilmer admits, straight up, that the divorce from Whalley left him bankrupt. This wasn't the first time, as he had previously given power of attorney to his would-be land maven father in the '80s, who allegedly attached his son's name to shell companies with the intention of avoiding taxes. All of this returns us to the modern-day image of Kilmer, an often heartbreaking character who doesn't want your sympathy, traveling around the country attending screenings of his old films, signing autographs at comic conventions and pausing only to vomit from the effects of chemotherapy.