AKA Charlie Sheen Review: Stream It or Skip It on Netflix?

At one point Charlie Sheen was TV’s highest-paid star and the internet’s loudest cautionary tale. Netflix’s two-part documentary AKA Charlie Sheen tries to reconcile those two realities, giving the actor space to unpack a life that swung from Oscar-adjacent promise to tabloid-scorched chaos and, lately, to careful repair.

Directed by Andrew Renzi, the series runs just over three hours split across 93 minutes and 88 minutes. That length gives the story room to breathe. It also tests your patience—especially if you remember the headlines and feel like you’ve seen this reel before. The question is whether the film finds anything new between the memes and the meltdowns. Mostly, yes.

What the documentary covers

The timeline starts fast. By 25, Sheen had already logged back-to-back turns in Platoon and Wall Street, the kind of one-two career launch most actors never get. Those wins sit right next to the early warning signs: a rehab stint for drugs and alcohol, an engagement to Kelly Preston that ended after a gun accidentally discharged, and an orbit around Hollywood’s seamier corners that turned into a gravitational pull. The film doesn’t sanitize any of it.

Renzi leans on a collage style—clips from films and TV, family footage, home-movie skits with the Estevez brothers, those infamous late-night talk show bites—to show how Sheen the leading man and Sheen the addict blurred into one brand. It’s a smart tactic. You feel how the performance never really shut off, on screen or off, and how the audience became a character in the story.

Talking-heads matter here, and the access is strong. Sean Penn appears, bowl cut and cigarette in hand, to deliver hard-earned perspective from someone who lived through the same era of fame’s extremes. There’s family context and industry voices that don’t just rubber-stamp the legend; they add texture to the spiral, the overdoses, the relapses, and the near misses that could have ended the narrative years ago.

Then there’s the big new admission: Sheen addresses long-rumored bisexuality directly. He frames it as relief—saying it’s been liberating to stop dodging the question—and the moment lands because the film doesn’t turn it into a stunt. It sits alongside his broader reflection on honesty: about substances, relationships, and the performances he gave to keep the chaos at bay.

The pivotal TV chapter—his nuclear split from Two and a Half Men—gets the treatment it deserves. The film revisits the “winning” era, the sound bites that went viral before we used that word for everything, the public feud with the show’s creator, and the way a man in crisis became an algorithm. Renzi doesn’t gawk, but he doesn’t airbrush either. You can see a feedback loop forming: attention fueling excess, excess feeding attention, and the work disappearing under the spectacle.

We meet a calmer Sheen on the other side, seven to eight years sober. He looks back without swagger, which is maybe the only way this works. The film positions sobriety as a daily practice, not a final act. It also nods to the limits of self-repair when the past is that loud. Not every mess can be explained away as “the character I was playing.”

Does it hold up as a film?

Renzi’s approach is polished and unhurried. The editing is careful about rhythms—pressing forward through the career climb, letting the crashes sprawl, then tightening up again once the public frenzy fades. The production value is high, but the style stays grounded. You don’t feel pushed into pity or moralizing. You’re asked to sit with a complicated life and decide what you think.

Still, the length is a trade-off. Part 1 is leaner, with momentum and stakes. Part 2 stretches into reflection and repair. Some stretches repeat the same beats—public excess, private fallout—when a sharper cut could have kept the pace taut. If you’ve followed Sheen for years, you might wish this were a distilled, two-hour feature rather than a sprawling two-parter.

Is it a PR exercise? The film knows you’re asking. It gives Sheen room to speak, but it doesn’t hand him a halo. The candid admission about sexuality is new; the sobriety check-ins feel real; the archival choices undercut any attempt at mythmaking. Yet the framing is forgiving. This is the tightrope of every redemption doc: offer empathy without laundering the past. Renzi mostly keeps his balance.

The craft choices help. The collage of clips turns celebrity into context, not garnish. The talking heads don’t feel like fan testimonials. And the home movies do what only home movies can do—remind you that fame started as a family business, with parents and siblings and a kid who wanted to be in the frame. That thread keeps the story human when the headlines get absurd.

As for the data point everyone checks: the series has landed strong early user scores on major databases (IMDb clocked in at 7.9/10 at the time of writing). Take that as a snapshot, not a verdict. What matters more is whether the doc gives you new information or a new way to process the old footage. On that front, it does enough to justify the watch.

The doc’s best scenes build tension between persona and person—the clip packages where he’s playing to the crowd, followed by the quiet sit-downs where he isn’t. They’re not flashy scenes, but they do the work. There’s a cost to keeping a performance going off camera, and the film shows it without turning pain into content.

The cultural layer lands too. Before social feeds could spin a moment into a month-long cycle, actors had publicists. During Sheen’s most performative period, the internet put gasoline on every spark. The doc isn’t a lecture on media, but it’s sharp about how the machine rewarded his excess and then kept the meter running while he burned out. That’s not an excuse; it’s a map.

So where does it leave us? With a man who has stopped selling bravado and started telling the truth he’s willing to share. With a director who resists cheap shots. And with a film that’s compelling, uneven, and very watchable if you care about how fame, addiction, and survival can tangle up a life.

Stream it or skip it?

• Stream it if you want a thorough, sometimes bracing look at Charlie Sheen that goes beyond the memes and gives him space to be specific and self-aware.
• Stream it if you like process-heavy docs with rich archival material and honest, unglamorous interviews.
• Skip it if you need a tight two-hour cut; the midsection does loop the same themes and could feel long if you know the history cold.
• Skip it if you’re looking for a takedown or a puff piece. This aims for the middle, where the truth usually lives.