You Can Call Me Bill
“I’m afraid of being alone,” intones William Shatner in the opening minutes of “You Can Call Me Bill.” It’s a sentiment that, as he tells it, has pervaded every moment of his life both on and off camera. As Captain Kirk, he barrels out into the universe to satisfy his curiosity about what’s out there. In real life, he battles loneliness and the ever-encroaching specter of oblivion here on Earth. And in front of Alexandre O. Phillippe, cinema’s most dogged chronicler of eccentric movie minds (“Lynch/Oz,” “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist”), he lays bare all these anxieties with all the self-effacing charm of his on-screen persona.
Playing like a stream-of-consciousness monologue, “You Can Call Me Bill” is content largely to just plop a camera down in front of the “Star Trek” icon and just let him riff. And riff he does, musing on everything from his childhood relationship to animals and nature to his pragmatic approach to acting. The results are magnetic, if a little fluffy, as his musings grow more and more introspective and lyrical.
Like so much of the man’s career, stretches of “You Can Call Me Bill” play out like parodies of Shatner’s decades-long relationship with fame and notoriety. He notes that his two earliest acting role models were Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando, which tracks for the two modes the stammering, pausing thespian has balanced all his life: Shakespearean silliness and Method sincerity. Phillippe illustrates this pull between the grand and the goofy with smartly laden clips of Shatner’s body of work, from early ‘50s Westerns (and an Alexander biopic, where he first cultivated his love of horseback riding) to self-parodying Priceline commercials and autotuned State Farm ads.
Smack dab in the middle, of course, is Captain James T. Kirk, a mythic pop cultural figure whose association to himself Shatner once reviled (“Get a life!” he once assailed Trekkies) but has now accepted. He admires the phrase “Go boldly”; most of us live our lives, he says, as if sitting in a waiting room when we should be giving all of ourselves to our dreams. Even when recounting his now-famous trip to space at the tender age of 90 via Jeff Bezos’ phallic Blue Origin rocket, he talks himself out of taking the chance to back out before liftoff. He can’t do that. He’s Captain Kirk.
Really, it’s hard to tell where James T. Kirk ends and William Shatner begins, and the material Phillippe ekes out of ol’ Shat bears out the two men’s similarities. “Every human being is limited by who they are,” Shatner says of his talents; an eminently practical Canadian actor, he admits to never taking his work home with him. In this respect, Shatner has only ever been who he is, which makes Kirk the closest thing to an avatar the man could imagine. (This bears out in his execrable-but-interesting “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” a shaggy-dog story about Shatner/Kirk reconciling life’s accumulated pain as a fundamental part of one’s self.)
