Stone is one of the handful of film directors whose name can sell a movie ticket, like Spielberg or like Scorsese, who features early in this book as Stone's teacher at film school in New York in the 70s.

In the book's closing pages, Stone is in his seat at the 1986 Academy Awards, waiting to hear whether Elizabeth Taylor will call out his name, or one of his fellow nominees for Best Director that year - David Lynch (Blue Velvet), Woody Allen (Hannah and her Sisters), Roland Joffe (The Mission) and James Ivory (Room with a View).

In that year, Stone released two films that would establish his name as both a film director of note and as a truth-teller - Salvador and Platoon.

Jackie Kennedy wrote to Stone that his film Platoon "changed the direction of a country's thinking. It will always stand there as a landmark - like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense."

Platoon was an exorcism of Stone's own experience as a volunteer soldier in Vietnam, and an act of self-psychoanalysis of his own childhood and his parents' relationship.

He deliberately ends this book at the time of his Platoon Oscar win. The Oliver Stone through the pages struggles to prove himself and convince those around him of his talent.

The book to come, hopefully currently in draft on Stone's laptop, would look at the fight to come - that of a monied and successful filmmaker using his platform to right wrongs, settle scores.

This Stone could use his leverage from Platoon to beget Wall Street and then to get his Born on the Fourth of July screenplay made, to unpack the rot at the head of the American system with political subjects JFK, Nixon and W.

Stone's book is an interesting companion piece to the 1996 James Riordan book Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone, which Stone himself references throughout.

After a prologue that establishes Stone as a risk-taking filmmaker, hanging on by the seat of his pants as 1000 extras stage a revolution before his cameras while filming Salvador in Mexico, Chasing the Light opens as an exploration of the American psyche.

It is now 1976 with Stone at one of his life's self-reflective moments, broke and driving taxis for a living, a film school graduate hoping to sell a screenplay.

Dropping out of Yale, a young Oliver Stone had thrown himself into his first planned career, of writing the Great American Novel.

Depressed at its rejection by publishers, Stone punishes himself for his 'act of hubris' by volunteering for the draft.

Specifically insisting on an infantry position so he can get to the front lines as soon as possible, Stone finds himself in the midst of some very real situations.

As a writer, his prose is the richest in this section of the book, and yet his whole experience is truncated into a dozen or so pages, which he justifies with, "I really was too young to understand, and thus I erased much of it".

Stone would spend the next half-century unpacking those experiences through his filmed work.

A lot more time is invested in establishing his parents - the charming French Jacqueline who he "wholeheartedly adored" and father Louis who he "trusted and respected, sometimes feared" - as characters.

As a screenwriter, Stone learned to pare back on the unessential and in this autobiography, he employs the same sense of economy.

Many of the people he grew up with, married, worked with, barely rate a mention unless they propel the narrative.

The product of a happy childhood, Stone can be honest about his parents flaws while acknowledging their role in his character.

"I never could have surmounted the obstacles I'd face later without that fundamental sense of optimism instilled by my mother into my nature. It became a basis to face life," he says.

At the book's centre are the usual photographs shared in autobiographies, and one depicts a smiling Stone returning to America from Vietnam in November 1968. "Numb and dumb" is his caption.

It will take this young man some time to work out who he wants to be, including learning at the hand of a pre-Mean Streets Martin Scorsese at the NYU Film School.

He will make two largely forgettable films as director before his work as a screenwriter gets him noticed, penning the script for Alan Parker's Midnight Express, John Milius's Conan the Barbarian and Brian De Palma's Scarface.

Despite being in the blast zone of some iconic pop culture as it was created, this isn't a kiss-and-tell kind of book.

Stone doesn't dish much dirt on anybody, though with the benefit of time, he does share challenging relationships, failed meetings, bad experiences, his cocaine use, though usually only in so far as demonstrating their role in his evolution to the filmmaker he would become.

I'm always fascinated by those "almost were" moments, and Stone shares a handful of pearls.

He shared an agent with Tom Cruise and was social acquaintances with Warren Beatty, and these two were for a moment Stone's hoped-for leads for the Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen roles in Wall Street.

Elsewhere, Stone passes on directing Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist, campaigns for Ridley Scott to direct Schwarzenegger in the first Conan film, and Marlon Brando presses Stone to direct Brando's unmade passion project about the 1864 massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado.

As a war veteran, Stone is sensibly prosaic about the combative nature of the film business. He writes of getting figuratively knifed, going into tussle with producers, but then dining with all of these same people and forgiving their transgressions.