Norman Mailer: The American

Nobody embodies this year's CIFF image campaign-“Be a Rebel / Be a Hero / Be a Lover”-like Norman Mailer. This documentary goes beyond Mailer the best-selling author and provocative performer, to capture him as a social critic, filmmaker (he directed the ill-fated “Maidstone” in 1970), and family man. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and began his long career as a writer at Harvard. His stint in the army in World War II became the basis for his breakout novel “The Naked and the Dead.” He wrote over 60 books and covered every major event in U.S. history, including the Apollo 11 launch, the death of John F Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and Muhammad Ali and George Forman's Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. During this time period, he was marrying six women and fathering nine children. In NORMAN MAILER: THE AMERICAN, the filmmaker interviews many of them and includes a startling testimony by Adele Morales Mailer about the night her husband stabbed her. A complex intellectual, an abrasive working-class hero, and an American who simultaneously loved and loathed his country, Norman Mailer always gave people something to talk about. – B.B.