A West Coast collector sells his first editions to found Black Sparrow Press in order to publish the man's poetry and suggests that he try a novel. An editor solicits his little magazine "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" for the inaugural issue of Open City, and when that raw, experimental paper folds, the column continues in the underground Los Angeles Free Press. Tom Waits calls him the "writer of the common people, the street people, dispossessed without a voice," Harry Dean Stanton reads his poetry for the camera, Lawrence Ferlinghetti books him for City Lights Bookshop appearances, Bono is so impressed that he dedicates a U2 concert song to him after Sean Penn introduced them via telephone from Dublin.

Dead ten years now, who was this Charles Bukowski, by some hailed as the liberator of poetry from academics and post-modern formalism, the successor to Whitman and Rimbaud, the writer Wordsworth and Kerouac should have become, the enemy of a three-fingered mouse's Disneyfication of the twentieth century, fabled drinker and haunter of whores and life's dark corners? Prolific poet (and compelling public reader) turned cult novelist, he has, widow Linda Lee offers, never quite caught on with the "Eastern Establishment" but is, for growing numbers of the chorus, the figure of modern American literature.

Director-producer John Dullaghan's immaculate consideration, Bukowski: Born Into This, does what a documentary film should do: unobtrusively remain background to let its subject run the show. Despite the often manipulative nature of the genre and a running time of a hundred thirteen minutes, there are no unnecessary or dull moments. From initial skeptical distance the viewer gets absorbed in the vital aura of a figure at once vulgarly hard-living but insecure, tough though tenderly sentimental, unconventional yet obsessed to keep a routine job as well as write.

Then an advertising copywriter, in 1994 Dullaghan was swept up by what he says is Bukowski's "message" to make use of our talents and finite lifetimes, avoiding co-option by the petty mundane. Leaving security at Apple Computer for precarious freelancing, he read further and began research for a book on the figure of the poet-novelist, which morphed into this seven-year, self-funded film project, his first feature.

Ably interviewing over a hundred fifty people and gathering countless photos and some thirty hours of mixed footage --including interviews done for Belgian, Italian and German television -- the director enlisted Crumb's editor Victor Livingston to help order "this Mount Everest of material," which, eighteen months later and still only two-thirds completed, was accepted for Sundance.

Literally filming writing, an improbable proposition, is neatly done through archival or interviewee readings, reinforced by restrained on-screen printouts of the organic-form words and lines. The finished product is far from slavishly chronological. Here and there, imaginatively arranged, emerge the unhappy abused childhood, the terribly disfiguring teen acne, psychological insecurity, on-the-bum travel and years of skid row, the "damaged" women, alcohol and the ponies, a numbing dozen years carrying or sorting mail, TB and near fatal bleeding ulcers, literary rejection, then success building from a small start.

The movie's outstanding achievement, however, lies in a rare unfolding of the man behind the image. For $20,000 Bukowski had done the filmscript for Barfly, was consulted at length by director Barbet Schroeder, and can himself be glimpsed on a Golden Horn barstool near Mickey Rourke -- the roman à clef Hollywood came out of that experience -- but wound up criticizing the film's authenticity and its portrayal of his alter ego Harry Chinaski. That is, the author was quite aware of his cultivated public persona, the Papa Hemingway Writer-as-Myth, and his one-liners about women, love, mankind, drink and writing ("an easy and a nice thing to do") often seem for direct consumption. "Hankering, gross, mystical, nude," he took as his subject the black suffering of the world and the individual, yet the truth and the bite are softened by a playful if sardonic wit.

Chip the tough patina, and beneath lay a scared, sensitive, attractive man looking for acceptance. Whatever the viewer's reaction to this writer and his art, without preachiness or narrative pointing the film brings him up close, not so much as the bard of the little guy as that little guy himself. "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." 

(Released by Magnolia Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)