I have this friend – let’s call her Celine – who is obsessed with Al Pacino. Obsessed is not an exaggeration. She sends unsolicited stickers of him to our group chats. She seriously considered buying a $400 poster of him. She could list his filmography to you without thinking. I've caught her shouting jokes at a birthday party more than once heat on someone. She sincerely intends to take a personal day of work after his death.

I support Celine's right to have an unhealthy interest in Al Pacino, but I've never really understood it myself. I had seen it The Godfatherand Celine made me watch heatand although I have to admit that I admired Pacino's ability to read the craziest lines (“she has a…”) great ass” runs through my head) and I tried it at full speed, but I didn't understand it. He's just an actor.

So when I saw Al Pacino releasing his first memoir this month, I saw an opportunity to understand it. What makes this actor so fascinating to people? Such a giant in the pantheon of cinema? And I had the perfect person to act as my guide. When I asked Celine if she would read the book with me and try to initiate me into the Church of Pacino, she wholeheartedly agreed. “I'm crying, this is the best gift I could ever give – God, I love him so much,” she said.

Celine watches more movies than anyone I know, but this fixation on Pacino's performances in particular is relatively new, she told me. Partly it's because Pacino is attractive, but that's far from the only reason. She came to Al Pacino at an intense, turbulent time in her life. “It was nice to see that intensity reflected on screen,” she said.

Before Celine received the book, she curated a Pacino triple feature for us: the three films that represented the scope of what I needed to see to understand Pacino's career, as much as three films can do. At first we watched Dog Day afternoonfor what intensity is really the right word. As Sonny Wortzik, the would-be bank robber, he has those wild, deep eyes that promise an escape long before it comes. And it's usually in a Pacino movie, Celine tells me. “It’s often a bit much – that’s the appeal,” she said. Except The Godfather. “But maybe The Godfather works because the audience knows what Pacino can do and he doesn't – that Danger of madness.” It is remarkable that a man who is perhaps 5’7” tall can contain so much raw energy.

Then we watched cruisewhich Celine said showed him in a different mode: softer, more subdued. We're done with Jack and Jillwhich I didn't look up before we sat down to watch it. This is a bad film. Now I was confused. This is your king? The guy who plays himself and raps about “dunkaccinos” in a movie where Adam Sandler is dressed as his own twin? “The thing is,” Celine turned to me and said, “he takes every role, even the bad films, with the utmost seriousness.” He always gives 100 points. There aren't many modern actors who do what Pacino did; Maybe Robert Pattinson: very good-looking, a heartthrob, but who always takes on strange roles.”

Pacino's memoirs, Sonny Boybegins again: in the South Bronx. Under normal circumstances, Al Pacino shouldn't have become Al Pacino. He grew up poor and was almost on the wrong side of things before a teacher at school noticed his acting talent. He spent his early years causing trouble on the streets with a gang of three friends. They all died of heroin overdoses. But Pacino writes that he knew even then that he would become someone. “Who was this kid with this wild energy that could light up a schoolyard at night?” he asks. He joined the Actors Studio and got lucky with an off-Broadway play in 1968 The Indian wants the Bronxand the snowball started rolling.

There's a lot here that will convince you that Pacino was indeed born to act. And that his performances seem almost like a divine inspiration to him – or perhaps that should be a devilish obsession that drives him to take unexpected risks that sometimes pay off and sometimes don't. “I am not afraid of occasional outbreaks of madness. I have been guilty of inconsistency and unconventional decisions,” he writes, and I think again of that “great” performance. For Pacino, if you don't go hard, it's not worth doing. “When I'm working, I'm up to date. If I do it. When I take risks. I want to take risks. I want to fly and fail. When I do it, I want to commit to something because that's the only way I know I'm alive.” His craft is everything to him. He quotes Shakespeare liberally throughout the book. He once became so engrossed in the role of Richard III that when Jackie Onassis came backstage to congratulate him after a performance, he sat slumped in his chair and offered her his hand to kiss.

All of this could be a little selfish and irritating if Pacino wasn't willing to hold his hands up when he messed up. In the 2000s, his accountant threw his finances into disarray, with Pacino's thoughtless spending habits playing a large part in him, such as forcing him to take on roles in which he played himself Jack and Jill. By this time he had made a number of truly terrible films, which he admits he did “just for the money.” “I somehow knew they were bad, but I convinced myself that I could somehow get them to be mediocre,” he writes.

However, as I read it, I felt like there was something about Pacino that didn't translate to the page. What fascinates people about Al Pacino? is a question that Pacino himself seems to ask in his memoirs. He is aware that there is a distance between Al Pacino, the man who gets up in the morning and strolls through Los Angeles, and Al Pacino, the myth who peeked out from the bedrooms of countless college boys Scarface and whose Shakespeare in the Park production of Shylock is still revered by industry and audiences alike. He writes about a time when he picked up his 8-year-old daughter from school and she asked him, “Dad, are you Al Pacino?” And he replied, “Well, I'm both.” I'm Dad and I'm Al Pacino. Can't you see both of my heads?” It's probably inevitable that a person as famous as Pacino would feel so divided, a tension between his public and his private self. But his sense of who one of these people is remains, fortunately, incomplete. “As I write this whole book, I learn a little more about myself, I start to see this person who is, in a word, anarchic,” he writes in one chapter.

When we both finished reading, I asked Céline if she thought the book explained Pacino's appeal.

“No, because I don’t think he knows the appeal himself.”

Pacino sees himself as a child who was very lucky, rather than someone with innate star power. That deep charisma he has, the manic, bubbly energy, you can only really see it when he's on screen or on stage, and he can't explain it. The closest he comes to this quality – and in fairness to him what an impossible task it is to do this to yourself – is by describing a hard-to-define, itchy restlessness he feels.

By Al Pacino. Penguin Press.

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“This is exactly who I am and always have been. I look at a situation and ask myself: What am I doing here? And it doesn't seem to matter where it is, what situation I'm in. I want to go. I'm not leaving because I really don't want to be rude, so I'm staying. But I really want to go.” This is the dichotomy of Pacino's performance: he is always completely devoted to his role, but the explosive side that fascinates him perhaps comes in part from a desire to be somewhere else.

“You feel like he's going to disappear from the screen, from the film at any moment,” as Celine put it, “and his performances captivate you even more.”

To see Pacino on screen is to see someone who somehow feels more alive than the people around him. There are hints for the reader from Sonny Boy where this living quality could come from. Pacino as narrator in Sonny Boy has an enduring zest for life. He just loves being on this earth and seems amazed at his own good fortune. Towards the end of the book, Pacino seems to apologize for his longing for the streets he grew up on, the people he worked with early in his career. “They have this expression: 'You can't look back.' Well, I look back and I love it. I love what I see. I love that I exist.” Elsewhere he writes: “It's overwhelming to me that these things really happened to me.” And well, that could be so. Things could have easily gone differently for him. But instead of dying of a heroin overdose at age 24, which was entirely possible, he became Al Pacino. And if you've become Al Pacino, why not turn the volume all the way up?

After this crash course, I have to say that I too love that it exists. Maybe not as much as Celine, but Despite it.