Review: 'Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel'

Harry Dean Stanton was a mass of contradictions. He was the quintessential character actor who saw himself as a leading man. He was an unshakable atheist who sometimes identified himself as a Buddhist. He was a loner who often found himself at the center of hard carousing. He was the bitter product of a mother who abandoned him but would not acknowledge a man who claimed to be his son. 

On screen Stanton was just as paradoxical. His face suggested rugged masculinity but the vulnerability behind his eyes hinted at much deeper complexity: he could be the villainous Mormon patriarch, the world-weary repo man, the doomed private dick with a wild-at-heart heart of gold, the everyman alien fodder.

 

Harry Dean Stanton’s utterly natural sweetness, roughness, warmth, and iciness made him one of Hollywood’s finest and most beloved character actors. He’s been in a slew of iconic films—Alien; Repo Man; The Godfather Part II; Cool Hand Luke; Paris, Texas; Pretty in Pink; a slew of David Lynch projects. However, he seemed little interested in his own icon status. When he learned that his biography was in the works shortly before his death, his reaction was allegedly, “I don’t give a fuck.”

So Joseph B. Atkins was not able to get his subject on board for the new biography Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel. The lack of Stanton’s involvement makes the book feel like an incomplete portrait even though this is likely to be the most thorough examination of the man’s life and career we’ll ever get. Atkins does manage to fill in many gaps with his own interviews with Stanton’s associates and Stanton’s apparently skimpy archival interviews (most of the quotes are pulled from a chat with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast). We learn about his toxic family, his rambling life as a sailor and musician, his friends and co-workers’ opinions of him as an artist and man. However, there are moments in the book that beg for Stanton’s personal insights. What was he thinking during an uncommunicative meal with a man who claimed to be his son? Based on what Atkins does reveal about a man often described as quiet and meditative, we probably still wouldn’t know even if Harry Dean Stanton agreed to talk with the author.