One day in January 1985, 16-year-old Josh Brolin was in Los Angeles filming the climactic scene in his debut film, “The Goonies.” In the largest and deepest soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios, he and the other young actors who were part of the gang of the same name were led backwards, their hands over their eyes, down a slope into the water. They had to be completely submerged, and when a signal was given they emerged, turned around and took in their surroundings: an underground cavern and the striking, breathtaking focal point, a pirate ship packed with treasure. Director Richard Donner wanted to capture their genuine, awed reaction. But Brolin’s response turned out to be too authentic. When he came up for air, he promptly contaminated it – and ruined the shot – by detonating two F-bombs.

This is representative of a number of other anecdotes in Brolin’s new memoir: short and snappy, colorful and witty. He is reckless and uninhibited in the story and candid and unfiltered in telling it. Here is a man who speaks his mind, expresses his feelings, makes mistakes – and gets there in the end.

‘From Under the Truck’ is not your average memoir. Instead of a linear narrative of chronological events, Brolin’s story darts back and forth through the years, resembling a jumbled patchwork of memories and meditations. In places it is messy and disjointed. But there is method to Brolin’s madness, as he manages to keep things together and captivate his reader with his take on what has thus far been a tumultuous life and varied career.

Brolin’s early years appear in scattered segments. Growing up on a farm in Paso Robles, California, with his parents and younger brother, he would wake up before first light to load a Chevy truck with bales of hay and, with two phone books tucked under his butt, make the rounds. to feed 40 horses. . When he was 11, the family moved to Santa Barbara and his best friend committed suicide. Brolin spent his early teens juggling two identities: At night, he worked as a cook at an Italian restaurant; During the day he ran wild like a rebel without cause or purpose in the Cito Rats, “my maverick hive of which I was at the epicenter.”

While his band of brothers crashed and burned, Brolin was given a lifeline through his acting hiatus. A career path opened up, but he still followed a wayward course involving drink, drugs and assaults in prison. Two chapters show him at a particularly low ebb. In a 1990 copy, he recalls staying in a flophouse and wandering aimlessly through the seedy streets and slums of Portland, Oregon, on the unlikely chance that Gus Van Sant would “discover” him and feature him in “My Own Private Idaho” would cast. In a somber episode two years later, we see him living alone in a “rented cell” in New York City, lamenting his failures as a husband and father, and, shirtless and shoeless, rising star Philip Seymour Hoffman in a subway station. .

In happier parts, Brolin records his reversals of fortune, from his second marriage to the revival of his career (after twenty years of making ‘dirty’). There are tender moments of him spending quality time with his four children or worrying about their safety, and even one or two inspiring moments, like a near-death experience in Costa Rica that hardened his resolve to return to the country. “It haunted me, what happened,” Brolin writes, “and whatever haunted me, I had to confront it again and again until it killed me or no longer had that power.”

What still haunts Brolin is what he calls “the eternal appearance of Jane.” His late mother, Jane Agee Brolin, was a dynamic – and often manic – force in his life. “She refuses to be a presence,” Brolin writes, and to prove it she returns again and again in the book, each time she looms large and steals scenes. Throughout the film, Brolin treats us to bizarre facts. She was a flight attendant in her early twenties, but was afraid to fly unless she was drunk. She insulted cowboys and truck drivers and then drank them away. She slept with a loaded 9 millimeter pistol on her bedside table and once pointed a gun at her boyfriend because she didn’t want him to leave. Rumor had it she was on someone’s hit list. She collected strays – not cats and dogs, but mountain lions, wolves and coyotes. She lived fast and rode faster and died when she crashed into a tree at high speed.

Jane gave her son his self-destructive nature and his ability to drink. However, it is not clear whether Brolin’s other parent, actor James, influenced his career choice. We hear about a father-son hunting trip and a lovely description of James coming home from work in LA and “shaking out of his head the fiction he had just been living in the South so he could return to the nonfiction that we were,” but for the most part he remains a distant figure in the book.

Brolin covers a range of other topics. He talks about travels, motorcycle rides and his battles with alcohol. There are stories of John Travolta ‘curing’ Marlon Brando and Brolin annoying Robert De Niro. One informative chapter includes diary entries about the making of “The Goonies” and Brolin’s smash comeback film, “No Country for Old Men” (2007). Another chapter unfolds like a two-person scene in a movie script between Brolin and his director in “W.” (2008), Oliver Steen.

There are flaws. Some chapters are just vignettes that lack substance and bite. Some stories wander and then disappear. And some are imbued with skewed imagery: “words that come to him like ghosts feeding chickens a handful of pellets.” Readers looking for anecdotes about Brolin’s performance in the 2008 biopic “Milk,” which earned him an Oscar nomination for supporting actor, will be disappointed.

Fortunately, Brolin hits more often than he misses, especially with the raw, rugged beauty of his prose. His trip down memory lane may consist of detours, wrong turns and dead ends, but ultimately it is an invigorating and insightful journey.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer and critic from Edinburgh, Scotland, who writes for The Economist, the Washington Post and other publications.