It wasn’t long ago that Shia LaBeouf was a rising star in Hollywood. He worked with big filmmakers like Steven Spielberg. He headlined major film franchises. And his car even turned into a robot. They were grand and glorious times.

But the last few months have not been kind to poor Shia. He got busted plagiarizing a comic—then announced his retirement, then turned his apology into surreal performance art. LaBeouf’s increasingly bizarre behavior culminated in June, when he was arrested after a drunken outburst at a performance of the Broadway show Cabaret. Shia pleaded guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct and was sentenced to six months of rehab, and now he’s back in public, trying to mend a few fences and promote his new movie, Fury. Last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live, LaBeouf explained, in a long and very entertaining story, exactly how someone winds up getting thrown in jail at an Alan Cumming musical:

Shia’s actually one hell of a storyteller; if the guy’s movies were half as entertaining as his tales of drunken misbehavior, people would have been begging him not to retire. At the end of the segment, Kimmel tries to bring LaBeouf around to saying that, yes, he screwed up, and that, yes, he’s got to keep his drinking under control. Hopefully he does. If he can (and he can stop shamelessly ripping off other writers and artists), he could have a very bright future on the talk-show circuit, not to mention in Hollywood.