Barfly bard

John Dullaghan’s documentary Bukowski: Born Into This takes a respectful, sober look at the life and work of a poet who was anything but. Until his death in 1994, Charles Bukowski lived up to his reputation as America’s poet laureate of skid row, as famous for his roaring, boozing mystique as for his blunt, hard-boiled verse.

The film starts with family and friends sharing stories of his wild behavior — “There was the time he pulled a knife on the maitre d’ at the Polo Lounge,” recalls his widow — but in interviews, Bukowski emerges as a candid, garrulous figure, sort of like Jason Robards nursing a hangover. Footage from European television shows reporters dragooned on tours of Bukowski’s seedy, unromantic milieu: a German TV crew rides along as the poet drives to a West Hollywood laundry with a broken windshield.

Dullaghan occasionally shakes up the chronology, but Bukowski mostly presents the poet’s biography straight up. Bukowski survives an abusive father and disfiguring acne in his childhood, spends several decades boozing, working subsistence jobs at the post office and writing until he finds a cult following among former Beats and emerging hippies.

You wonder if Bukowski embellishes his anecdotes, like his description of losing his virginity, at age 24, to “a 300-pound whore.” At times his emotional side slips its chain. He weeps at the memory of an old girlfriend when reading a poem, and later lashes out viciously at his wife during the filming of an earlier documentary.

Earthy insights pepper his conversation and verse alike, such as his observation, “People are no good to each other. Perhaps if they were, our deaths would not be so sad.” Bukowski features hard-living character actor Harry Dean Stanton reading some of the poet’s work, and occasionally puts the verses on screen.

Celebrities including Bono, Sean Penn and Tom Waits chime in with their admiration for the poet, but the film fortunately keeps the gushing to a minimum. Although the documentary sets too deliberate a pace, at least it gives you the itch to get reacquainted with Bukowski’s work, preferably while sitting astride a barstool — and there can be no better tribute to the poet than that. Image Image Image Image Image

Bukowski: Born Into This is now playing at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema.