Josh Brolin’s memoir presents a series of vignettes featuring the actor as himself

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 soundscape in Warner Bros. At the studio, he and the other young actors who made up the eponymous gang were led backwards with their hands over their eyes, down a ramp and into the water. They had to be completely submerged, and when given a signal, they would emerge, turn and take in their surroundings – an underground grotto and its eye-catching, jaw-dropping focal point, a treasure-laden pirate ship. Director Richard Donner wanted to capture their genuinely amazed reaction. But Brolin’s reaction proved too authentic. Coming up for air, he contaminated the prompt – 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 unrestrained in the story and honest and unfiltered in the telling of it. Here is a man who speaks his mind, airs his feelings, makes mistakes – and gets there in the end.

“From Under the Truck” is not your average memoir. Rather than a linear narrative of chronological events, Brolin’s account goes back and forth over the years, resembling a jumbled patchwork of reminiscences and meditations. In places it is scratchy and disjointed. But there is method in Brolin’s madness because he manages to keep it all hanging and capture his reader with his take on what has so far been a tumultuous life and varied career.

Brolin’s early years appear in scattered segments. Growing up on a ranch 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 under the back, make the rounds and feed 40 horses. When he was 11, the family moved to Santa Barbara and his best friend killed himself. Brolin spent his early teenage years juggling two identities: At night, he worked as a cook in an Italian restaurant; during the day he ran wild like a rebel without a cause or a purpose in the Cito rats, “my maladjusted hive of which I was at the epicenter.”

While his band of brothers crashed and burned, Brolin got a lifeline through his acting break. A career path opened up, but he still followed a wild course of drink, drugs and seizures in prison. Two chapters show him particularly low. In one dated 1990, he recalls staying in a flop house and wandering aimlessly around the grittier streets and slums of Portland, Ore., with no chance of Gus Van Sant “discovering” him and casting him in “My Own Private Idaho”. In a more somber episode dated two years later, we find him living alone in a “rented cell” in New York City, lamenting his failures as a husband and father, and, shirtless and shoeless, buttonholed rising star Philip Seymour Hoffman in a subway station.

In happier sections, Brolin chronicles his reversals of fortune, from his second marriage to his career resurgence (after two decades doing “drink and fodder”). There are tender moments when he spends quality time with his four children or worries about their safety, and even an inspiring moment or two, such as a near-death experience in Costa Rica that hardened his decision to return to the country. “What happened haunted me,” Brolin writes, “and whatever haunted me I had to confront again and again until it either killed me or ceased to have that power.”

Still haunting Brolin is what he calls “the eternal apparition of Jane.” His late mother, Jane Agee Brolin, was a dynamic—and often manic—force in his life. “She doesn’t refuse to be a presence,” Brolin writes, and to prove it, she returns again and again in the book, each time looming large and stealing scenes. Throughout, Brolin regales us with outlandish facts. She was a flight attendant in her early 20s but was afraid to fly unless she was drunk. She would insult and then outwit cowboys and truckers. She slept with a loaded 9-millimeter handgun on her nightstand and once pointed a rifle at her boyfriend because she didn’t want him to leave. It was rumored that she was on someone’s hit list. She collected stray animals – not cats and dogs, but mountain lions, wolves and coyotes. She lived fast and drove faster and died when she speeded into a tree.

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

Brolin covers a number of other topics. He talks about travels, motorcycle rides and his struggles with booze. There are stories involving John Travolta “healing” Marlon Brando and Brolin annoying Robert De Niro. An informative chapter includes diary entries detailing the making of “The Goonies” and Brolin’s major comeback film, “No Country for Old Men” (2007). Another chapter unfolds as a two-person scene in a movie script between Brolin and his director in “W.” (2008), Oliver Stone.

There are errors. Some of the chapters are just vignettes that lack substance and bite. Some stories meander and then disappear. And some are filled with wry images: “words that come to him like ghosts feeding chickens handfuls of pills.” Readers looking for anecdotes about Brolin’s performance in the 2008 blockbuster “Milk,” which earned him an Oscar nomination for his supporting role, will be disappointed.

Fortunately, Brolin hits more often than he misses, especially with the raw, gritty beauty of his prose. His trip down memory lane may consist of detours, wrong turns and dead ends, but in the end it is a refreshing 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.