Universal Pacino

You can’t tell the story of American cinema without Al Pacino, but it has taken him eighty-four years to get around to telling his own. Plenty of celebrities have put pen to paper in an effort to enshrine their life story well before becoming an octogenarian, but Sonny Boy, Pacino’s delightfully ramshackle and deeply heartfelt memoir, instantly benefits from feeling like a full, close-to-finished story. ‘I’m a man who has limited time left,’ he says, explaining his desire to share parts of himself that his public persona might have never fully conveyed, things that slipped through the cracks in an otherwise highly visible and well-documented life.

Pacino’s earliest memories are of his mother taking him to the movies (‘I had to have been the only five-year-old who was brought to The Lost Weekend’). It was respite from a destitute upbringing that Pacino nevertheless describes lovingly and vividly. This is the South Bronx in the early 1940s, where Pacino grew up with his single mother, Rose, in his grandparents’ house, running with a crew of adolescent ne’er-do-wells: Petey, Bruce, and Cliffy (who once ‘stole a city bus’ for kicks). These early sections of Sonny Boy read like a lost Dickens novel. Even Pacino acknowledges the fictional sheen of it all: ‘When I try to explain what it was like growing up in the South Bronx to young people, I feel like I’m describing Oliver Twist’s London to them.’