Pacino's new memoir, Sonny Boy, is a 363-page attempt to make sense of all that, drawing a through-line from the rambunctious kid getting chased by cops across the South Bronx to the octogenarian Hollywood icon dancing down the streets of Beverly Hills. His childhood serves as a framing device, with the actor crediting his single mother with keeping him off the streets enough to avoid the grim fate of his beloved neighborhood crew.
At its best, reading it feels like pulling up a stool next to the actor as he unspools one anecdote after another, often beginning with charmingly vague table-setting about how 'one day' he bumped into Marty.
Pacino swerved away from his contemporaries toward the operatic, carving out a lane for himself as the guy who often goes big in ways that both thrill and confound. He went electric, and has continued to reveal new versions of himself ever since.
His hangdog eyes could communicate anything from beneath the surface, be it the exhausted paranoia of Frank Serpico or the caged animal threatening to explode out of Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon.
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