'Greenlights': Life according to Matthew McConaughey

Matthew McConaughey's memoir, "Greenlights," has a way of convincing you that being Matthew McConaughey is just about the easiest thing in the world.

Look at his filmography, and you'll see an actor who gutted his way to critical and commercial success: He started with cameos and low-budget indies in the '90s, labored in the rom-com salt mines in the early 2000s, then pivoted to Oscar bait and prestige TV, finally reaching the mountaintop with a best actor Academy Award for "Dallas Buyers Club" in 2014.

By his reckoning, his fame wasn't so much about raw ambition as much as it was with being preternaturally "alright, alright, alright" with everything, every step of the way. McConaughey's self-effacing slacker-cool attitude has made him an ideal masculine movie hero for our anxious moment.

A great thing about "Greenlights" is that the persona never sounds like a put-on. The bad thing, though, is that he obviously wrote it himself and seems certain that in addition to being a memoirist he's also a certified motivational speaker and, worse, a poet.

McConaughey recalls growing up in rural Texas, the son of parents who married three times and divorced twice. His pugnacious father was a pipe salesman and one-time draftee of the Green Bay Packers. who would fulfill his dream of dying while having sex. How could McConaughey not be inspired by that kind of temperament? "Yes, he called his shot all right," McConaughey writes.

His first major film role was fittingly quirky: A chance meeting with the casting director of "Dazed and Confused" in a hotel bar led to him to the role of Wooderson, the 20-something still stuck on chasing high-school girls. It's where he uttered that first "alright, alright, alright" — "the very first words I said on the very first night of a job I had that I thought would be nothing but a hobby, but turned into a career."

He's glad that people have taken up "alright, alright, alright" as a mantra, but then McConaughey seemingly never met a mantra he didn't like. In college, he stumbled upon "The Greatest Salesman in the World," a 1968 book by Og Mandino, whose work is a bottomless resource for Successories posters and #MondayMotivation posts. Mandino's ethos of positivity and persistence transformed McConaughey, which is to his credit. Alas, it also means he wants to try his hand at it, too, and "Greenlights" is stuffed with vaporous, circular proverbs for would-be McConaugheys: "All Prodigals once Pharisee, All Pharisees once Prodigal," "I am good at what I love, I don't love all that I'm good at," "the arrow doesn't seek the target, the target draws the arrow," "I was remembered by being forgotten."

McConaughey's pronouncements all feed into his core philosophy of what he calls "livin": "There's no 'g' on the end of livin because life is a verb," he insists, which is a reasonable way to understand life, if not gerunds. Throughout "Greenlights," the doctrine of "livin" manifests itself through aphorisms, bumper stickers and poetry, the last of which is uniformly cringeworthy. He makes no grand claims to literary greatness, but that hardly removes the sting of bad puns ("Fish for yourself. / Self-ish."), Dr. Seuss-isms ("I swallow vitamins with a beer I do, / chew more tobacco than I ought to") or poems where the title alone should put you off reading further ("Today I Made Love to My Woman").

Following the lead of his first connection in Hollywood, who told McConaughey he would get the work he wants when he stopped wanting it so much, McConaughey's most cherished advice is non-advice. "I believe everything we do in life is part of a plan," he writes. "Sometimes the plan goes as intended, and sometimes it doesn't. That's part of the plan." Some plan.

But the McConaughey effect is that you can't be too annoyed at McConaughey — seeker, world traveler, naked bongo player turned well-meaning family man. (He's married with three kids, another one of those good-things-happen-when-you-stop-seeking-them things.) So, on a scale of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" to "True Detective," "Greenlights" is a solid "Magic Mike" — simply structured, a little flashy, but not as insightful as it wants you to think it is. The lengthy bio at the end of "Greenlights" states that McConaughey is "a very intentional man." But the intentions are largely a mystery to all but the man himself.