The film itself isn’t particularly well-crafted, original, or insightful, but Bukowski is such a fantastically interesting and deeply human character that you can’t help but be charmed, and moved. I’ve read a bunch of his poetry (I used to have a wonderful tape of him reading) but none of his novels. Soon!

It’s an interesting film, but it’s a bit sloppy. It doesn’t touch all the bases, it doesn’t do all the research, and it doesn’t hit hard to get the most out of the people he did manage to bring in for interviews. It is good at digging up old footage, especially the video B/W stuff of Buk driving around East Hollywood to do his laundry in 1976 in his old Volks with a smashed in windshield, courtesy of crazy girlfriend Linda King. But there was just something missing for me. He just barely skimmed. It was a movie version of any of the many Bukowski biography books that have been published recently, that only tell part of the story. Seriously, you’d do much better reading the Howard Sounes biography. The only explanation, other than the director being relatively new to Bukowski, was that he closely worked with his widow to get started on everything, which meant he only had the “official” view on everything. Oh well. It’s entertaining, but it’s a rent-not-buy for me. (Well, pretty much everything is now, though.)