Difficult, fearsome, aggressive: the Faye Dunaway documentary is unusually frank

Faye: The Many lives of Faye Dunaway, now streaming on Max in the US, is a refreshingly frank portrait of a genuinely interesting star. In fact it is often surprisingly candid. The director Laurent Bouzereau is a friend of the actor’s son Liam Dunaway O’Neill, who appears several times, so it is naturally a very compassionate film. Crucially, however, it confronts without flinching the subject’s reputation for being what is euphemistically described as “difficult” – so much so that even the redoubtable Bette Davis told Johnny Carson she would never work with her again.

Related: Chinatown at 50: has there been a greater screenplay since?

The documentary begins with Dunaway on edge, haranguing the film-makers to get started. She displays both the tetchiness and the perfectionism – the couch, the camera angle just aren’t right – that fed into that notorious reputation. But her face lights up as soon as she is handed a print of her famous 1977 post-Oscars photograph, lounging poolside at the Beverly Hills hotel, surrounded by newspapers heralding her triumph, and the award itself, perched on the breakfast table next to the teapot. That morning, at the photographer Terry O’Neill’s request, she woke up at 6am after the party of a lifetime to capture the moment on film. This is part of the work, and she wants to talk about her work – it’s what she lived for.

Through this in-depth interview with Dunaway, an increasingly rare opportunity, and contributions from friends, family, lovers and colleagues, a picture swims into focus of a woman with many gifts and challenges. The films speak for themselves, perhaps. She is unforgettably sharp in Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network … playing a range of damaged, uncompromising women in era-defining films. Very often they were characters with whom she shared a close affinity.

Like the programming chief Diana in Network, Dunaway had a fearsome work ethic, instilled by her very capable mother during a difficult childhood. And so the young Dunaway was single-minded about getting to the top. In the early 1960s she made her way to Broadway and into Elia Kazan’s company, where she says she really learned to act, before breaking into movies. “I’ve always been about my work,” she says. “I need my work. It fulfils me, it makes me feel good about myself.” Lovers and husbands, notably O’Neill and Marcello Mastroianni, are part of her story but they don’t define it – the films do.

She also inherited something of her father’s alcoholism, which took hold of her in the 1980s, but she is sober now. And from who knows where, she also has bipolar disorder, which was only diagnosed and treated later in her life. She talks in some detail about how it has affected her and how it explains some of her erratic behaviour. Her anxiety over details, or aggressive treatment from co-workers, such as when the director Roman Polanski plucked a single rogue hair from her head without warning on the set of Chinatown, could trigger what she calls her mood swings. But she doesn’t hide behind her diagnosis: “I don’t need to make an excuse about it. I’m still responsible for my actions.”

The career is impressive but not unblemished, and for many her unhinged portrayal of Joan Crawford in the controversial Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest remains an embarrassment. At the time, Roger Ebert called it “a pointless record of neurotic child abuse … one of the most depressing films in a long time”, though now it is a cult favourite, screening at midnight showings to devoted audiences waving coat hangers in homage to one of the most brutal, and also deeply odd, scenes. In a clip from an old TV interview Dunaway is philosophical, and kind, when she is asked about her career regrets. “I might take Crawford back, but I really wouldn’t because I did like her so much.” Crawford had liked her too, once saying that of the new crop of talent “only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage to make a real star”. Mommie Dearest, of course, was made a few years after Crawford’s death, and arguably too soon at that.

There is a constructive comparison to be made between the way Mommie Dearest presents the allegations against Crawford, as well as her own punishing neuroses, as grotesque, even laughable, and this documentary. Faye explores Dunaway’s mental illness with much more sympathy and seriousness – she says it is “just a thing that is part of my makeup” – but does so without washing it, or its consequences, away.

As James Gray, who directed Dunaway in The Yards, points out: “Whatever reputation that she had in some ways is also a comment on how women are in some ways treated and judged on a very different scale than men.” The portrait of a committed, driven artist, who sometimes lashes out, whose genius is accompanied by mental anguish, is more often painted for her male peers. And Dunaway was certainly committed to her roles. From encouraging Jack Nicholson to strike her face in the horrific “sister-daughter” revelation scene in Chinatown, to her ruthlessly deglamorised turn as a drunk in Barfly, she pursued a rare emotional authenticity. As Dunaway says here: “I’m a down-and-dirty, very dramatic actress.”

The darkness is never far away. Even in that celebrated poolside photograph after her Oscar win for Network, the sense of her post-euphoric comedown is palpable, and a newspaper at her feet reminds us that her co-star Peter Finch died before he could experience the glory in which she has just basked. Dunaway’s openness in this film asks us to look beyond the glamorous facade of Hollywood success.