‘How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer’ Review: A Haunting Doc Captures the Majesty of the Mailer Experience, and Its Dark Side Too

in 100 minutes it weaves together multiple levels and dimensions of The Mailer Experience. It’s about Mailer the writer, the celebrity, the failure, the intoxicated underworld-of-the-'50s searcher, the culture warrior and provocateur, the literary comingler of fiction and reality, the filmmaker, the serial husband and paterfamilias, the talk-show firebrand, the self-dramatizing hoodlum who stabbed his wife...AND the obsessive artist.