The Real Charlie Chaplin, review: how a kid from London became a Great Dictator

When documentaries promise the real version of their subject, it implies a fake one in wide circulation – or at least a well-maintained fa?ade, behind which we’re about to be afforded a privileged peek. With Charlie Chaplin, it’s not quite clear that’s the case.

Yes, of course Chaplin’s screen persona – the Little Tramp with his toothbrush moustache, bowler hat and bendy cane, simultaneously bumbling and elegant – bore little resemblance to his creator, who rose from poverty to found his own studio and direct, write and star in some of the most acclaimed and beloved motion pictures ever made.

But Chaplin’s personal story is also, at this point, extremely well-worn: the humble London beginnings, the trip to America with an English vaudeville troupe, the big break at Keystone Studios, the global stardom, the satirical and sentimental masterpieces, the scandals both political and marital, the Swiss exile, the knighthood, and the (doubtless conscience-stricken) honorary Oscar from the business that had shunned him two decades beforehand.

Directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney obviously understand this, because the ‘real’ Chaplin unveiled in their playful, inquisitive, engrossing film is one who never existed. Rather, he’s a triangulation – a figure suspended between reality and performance, and whose essence could be found in the ghostly overlap.

It’s more than mere biographical trivia, Middleton and Spinney’s film argues, that the rickety garret in The Kid (1921) so closely resembled the attic room he shared with his mother and older brother at 3 Pownall Terrace – or that the city sets he built at his Hollywood studio didn’t evoke the Los Angeles streets outside, or those of New York, or some more fantastical place entirely, so much as the soot-caked, rubble-strewn Lambeth roads through which he roved as a child.

In fact, his genius partly lay in his capacity for refining his own experiences and ideas into cinema that transcended social, national and linguistic limits. The Nazis were convinced he was a Jew, the FBI a homosexual: wrong on both counts, though the accusations somehow feel like backhanded compliments.

Some of its more revealing sequences involve actors lip-synching along to original audio tapes, creating artful hybrids of reenactment and truth – a trick Middleton and Spinney also utilised in their 2016 film Notes on Blindness. There’s a rare at-home interview with Life Magazine, and a famously tumultuous press conference in 1947 after he’d been accused of harbouring Communist sympathies, at which he memorably told the press to “proceed with the butchery”. (In these, Chaplin himself is always shown out of focus in the background, or from behind.)

The best is undoubtedly a detailed, evocative interview given by Effie Wisdom, a childhood friend of Charlie’s, to the historian Kevin Brownlow in 1983 when she was 92 years old. There are also fun sections on Chaplin impersonators – both the admirers and the plagiarists – and an excellent chapter on the odd parallels between Chaplin and Hitler, which naturally culminates with The Great Dictator (1940).

Buffs might bridle at the omission of some films and hurried treatment of certain events, but a representative picture of Chaplin’s life and career does emerge, bolstered by plenty of wonderful clips which are allowed to speak – or more often not speak – for themselves.

As portraiture, it’s also unapologetically (and therefore unfashionably) complex: the unsavoury aspects of his personal life are frankly addressed, but never used as a stick with which to beat the work. Rather, the signature tone of the narration – nicely delivered by the Doctor Who actress Pearl Mackie – is one of curiosity. And the fascination proves infectious.

12A cert, 114 min. Dirs: Peter Middleton, James Spinney. In cinemas from Friday