“Cinematography by Val Kilmer” is one of the more unexpected credits to pop up in a documentary, until you realise he’s been shooting Val since his childhood days in California, horsing about with his brothers doing movie parodies on Roy Rogers’s old ranch. Early on in Val, we see the young tyke doing a pretty serviceable impression of Robert Shaw in Jaws — scoffing crackers in the classroom scene. His precocity as an actor at that formative age gives you a winking preview of the intense, erratic, famously persnickety star he would become.

The 61-year-old Kilmer, who’s looking more and more like Karl Lagerfeld’s long-lost twin, has recovered from a life-threatening bout of throat cancer, which stole his voice away in 2015. He can only eat, breathe and speak with the aid of a tube, and can only do one of these things at once. The cancer may have retreated, but the ravages it has wrought on his vocal cords have made his gradual retirement from acting lately – despite an ill-advised cameo in The Snowman (2017) and a forthcoming appearance in Top Gun: Maverick – all but inevitable. 

The credited directors on this project might be Leo Scott and Ting Poo, but Val feels from top to bottom like Kilmer’s baby, and even though his son Jack does a fine job with the voiceover narration, the words are all Val’s. The film could have been an indulgent memoir, a scrapbook of a major (if stunted) leading-man career. But seeing so much of it through Kilmer’s own viewfinder gives it both focus and poignancy. The loss of his brother Wesley, who drowned after an epileptic fit when he was 15, is an especially haunting through-line.

Kilmer’s fame as a Hollywood star, thanks to his run of highly commercial roles from Top Secret (1984) onwards, relied on some pretty junky movies — a source of frustration to the man who, in his day, was the youngest drama student ever admitted to Juilliard. He had a dream back then, of playing Hamlet by the age of 27 or 28; instead he got the part of Iceman in Top Gun (1986) at about that age, a role he couldn’t refuse because he was under contract to Paramount at the time.