“I think there’s so many stories and images ingrained in people’s minds about the concept of me,” the actor Charlie Sheen tells the camera in the new two-part Netflix documentary about his life, “aka Charlie Sheen.” “It’s not even like they think of me as a person. They think of me as a concept, or a specific moment in time.” This assessment, though probably true of celebrity figures in general, strikes me as especially apt in Sheen’s case, if only thanks to his constancy in our media landscape over the past four decades. Especially to a viewer in her late forties, such as myself, it seems that Sheen has always been around: a show-business soldier never far from the reach of a camera, ready to embody a mood or an era.

In the nineteen-eighties, when Sheen was in his early twenties, he foll

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