Alexandre O. Phillippe’s You Can Call Me Bill (2024) finds its subject, William Shatner, thinking about the end of his life, global warming, and a career spent entertaining the world as a means to negate loneliness. Shatner sat down for a long form interview that, aside from some carefully curated clips, makes up the bulk of the movie. In this interview Shatner is more vulnerable and introspective than he has ever been.
You Can Call Me Bill is very much like Shatner’s one-man show Shatner’s World: We Just Live In It (2013) in terms of being an oral autobiography. But the mood of Shatner’s live show was often silly, always playful, and sometimes sentimental. You Can Call Me Bill on the other hand is more contemplative; it’s less interested in biography and more invested in portraiture. The image of William Shatner that emerges from You Can Call Me Bill is a juxtaposition to the Shatner of Free Enterprise (1998) or his many albums. This is Shatner looking back at a life spent living in the moment.
Phillippe proves to be the perfect documentarian of singular personalities in entertainment. You Can Call Me Bill succeeds in feeling like the product of Shatner as much as it does Phillippe. Formally You Can Call Me Bill isn’t groundbreaking, but it doesn’t need to be. It shows us William Shatner as he is and as he was in various film and television clips. But it all feels part of a whole, part of one man’s journey through life.
As someone so devoted to William Shatner that I’ve seen William Shatner’s Splat Attack thrice, You Can Call Me Bill was a treat. This man who as Captain Kirk was like a surrogate father is preparing to die and he’s invited me, invited us, to bid him farewell. It was a surprisingly moving experience that akin to David Bowie’s Blackstar. You Can Call Me Bill is a must-see.
