Marlon Brando who died in 2004 left behind hundreds of hours of audio recordings on tape where he discusses various aspects of his life, the highs, the lows and his acting career. Some of it is incoherent as he rambles and mumbles in a bewildering manner.

The film is topped and tailed by a digitised head of Brando created for some unspecified movie. Brando revolutionised screen acting by popularising techniques he learned from Stella Adler, the Method which wowed the stage and he then brought it on screen. You can hear him tell us how exhilarating it felt was to finish a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, getting on a motorbike, riding around New York in the early hours, then heading to a club in Harlem and party the rest of the night.

We see interview footage, documentary clips and clips from films like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Godfather, Mutiny of the Bounty, The Formula, Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris.

It is insightful to see him playing Don Corleone and hear the man how he prepared for the role, his motivation. In a sense an acting masterclass when he tells how easy it is to slap Johnny Fontaine on the screen but to stay still, silent when he hears the news that his son Sonny is killed, that was difficult.

Brando was also a political activist, he had strong views of race, the shoddy treatment of native Indians. Less interesting to me was his haphazard and in some sense tragic personal life, especially as his son was accused of murder.

This is not a complete picture though. As an actor Brando started the 1950s as a trailblazer but also acquired a reputation of being difficult and lazy. The 1960s were dogged by movies that were critical and commercial failures until he won his second Oscar for The Godfather.

Then apart from Last Tango, he made cameos vast amounts of money such as Superman and The Formula. By which time he was obese, not bothering to learn his lines but get fed them via an earpiece.

I wanted to know more about this, we get little. It is left to Francis Coppola in his own documentary footage to tell us about the frustrations of working with Brando for Apocalypse Now.

His final acting years where he would make fitful appearances are glossed over. I would like to have heard him talk about his significant role in A Dry White Season, a film he worked for almost no pay and for which he got his final Oscar nomination.

I was never too enthused by this film. I still felt I got to know very little about Brando but it was nice to hear from him even though some of what he said was less than compelling.

Marlon Brando was, to say the least, a somewhat enigmatic figure in the public eye for many years - notwithstanding (or because directly of) reports from set or that time he was on Larry King, he could be beautiful, compassionate, difficult, weird, crazy, tragic (re: his kids and what befell them/they did),bizarre, provocative, secret, shy, BIG, and so many things, but above all a box of contradictions. These get to be seen on a bigger canvas and some added context with Listen to Me, Marlon, a documentary that uses (mostly) audio-recorded bytes from Brando as he spoke into a tape recorder for many years, whether it was preparing for a role (as we hear for Apocalypse Now and Last Tango in Paris),self-hypnosis (he had to meditate a lot one can see),and just stuff to leave behind for his kids. From 198 hours (!) of recordings director Riley gets a lot of interesting facts and opinions and takes on life, acting, parents, his kids, Tahiti, and the directors he worked with and roles he made flesh.

The contradiction at heart of Brando's career, though it probably extends to his personal life as well, is that he took his craft very seriously - the "method" style and its popularity came by and large from Brando in the 50's via Stella Adler and Stanislavski to use 'real' emotions felt over time to inform the performance - and yet after a short time of making (really) a classic set of films in the 50's, quickly became disenchanted/disillusioned by the process. He's on record here of saying things like 'I've never been in a 'great' movie and there's no such thing as a 'great' movie' and that finding any sort of "art" in it is ridiculous as it's all about money and merchants peddling their works. He may have a point but at the same time undercuts that by how seriously he took digging in to someone like Stanley Kowalski (who was not someone he could identify himself with) or Vito Corleone (who he wanted to give some dignity to as a gangster) or Colonel Kurtz (albeit he perpetuates the myth that Coppola didn't know what he was doing at all until he stepped in, but there's another documentary to see about that whole story of course).

So he felt conflicting things about cinema, and yet cared a lot about civil rights and the rights for Native Americans (the notorious moment where he sent Littlefeather to get the Godfather Oscar is still awkwardly funny and touching at the same time). He was a lot of things, but what's impressive about the documentary is how the director is able to tap into many different things and weave together a complete portrait from just over an hour and a half of clips out of 198 hours. While he does overdo some of the music cues (near the end there's opera singing for Godsakes),there's such a wealth of emotions and perspectives given that incidents like the ones with his kids - when Christian was kidnapped at 13 and then, as an adult, convicted of murder involving his half-sisters boyfriend - make him appear very flawed and all the more human for it.

Though not altogether fully great (maybe it could've stood being even longer, like there's only so much time so here's the Greatest Hits),I felt like I got a lot of out this, almost like a Citizen Kane if all of the takes were from Kane examining his life and work himself. And it provides a good lesson not just for actors but people in general: pay attention to his you "act" in life, as everybody does it and it's both not special and the most important thing in what you do, whether it's on camera or (especially) off.

Marlon Brando's most frustrating life recorded on tapes. Those eerie pictures of him with that frozen head;in certain pictures he even looks like Thomas Jefferson with that pony tail.

No question about it, Brando proves that there is a fine line between sanity as compared to insanity. Growing up in a household dysfunctional by its alcoholic parents, is it any wonder why Brando's frustrations grew way into adulthood.

He was a brilliant actor by studying Stella Adler's method of acting,which had a great impact on his life.

While we see him in clips of "Streetcar Named Desire," we see the clips with Viven Leigh; we see acting by both at its brilliant best. Acting to Brando was a way out to vent his frustrations and inability to cope.

The black and white cinematography creates an eerie setting, as Brando frustrated and often off-the-wall seeks clarification and justification for his life.