The documentary Val currently playing on Amazon Prime is about actor Val Kilmer, whose career heyday was in the 1980s and ’90s with films like Top Gun (1986), The Doors (1991), Tombstone (1993), Batman Forever (1995), and Heat (1995). Throughout his life, Kilmer obsessively shot video footage of everything from his privileged childhood in the Central Valley of California, from acting classes at Juilliard to the sudden Hollywood stardom that quickly dominated much of his life. Throughout it all, he sees himself as an artist frustrated by the commercial demands of Hollywood filmmaking, who nevertheless fought the good fight.

Much of the emotional impact of the documentary involves what’s become of Kilmer today, who at a relatively young age — he’s sixty-one — relies on a voice box to speak after a battle with throat cancer. We’re shown that, having lost the fortune he made in his years of stardom, he sustains himself through paid appearances at conventions, where he spends hours signing Top Gun posters with the line he spoke as his macho pilot character Iceman, “You can be my wingman anytime.” He also does special public events such as nostalgic screenings of the film Tombstone. He acknowledges that trading on past film roles in this way is regarded as a humiliating experience for an actor, and adds that he finds a kind of salvation in the love of his fans.

The unsparing, confessional quality of a some of this material does a lot to disguise what doesn’t get examined in this film. Kilmer has a very definite narrative of his own life that directors Leo Scott and Ting Poo seem willing to adhere to without interrogation — the narrative of the suffering artist whose head is bloody but unbowed. The most obvious omission is Kilmer’s own reputation for being so extraordinarily difficult to work with that he torpedoed his own film career years before his illness robbed him of his voice.