Bukowski: Born Into This movie review (2004)

John Martin, the publisher, says he offered Bukowski a monthly stipend to live on, with the condition that he quit his job at the post office. One of his first novels was Post Office, a snarl at the daily torture of hard work under stupid bureaucrats. It snarled, yes, but it also sang, and was romantic and funny. It came directly from Bukowski's life, as did such autobiographical novels as Women and Hollywood.

The Hollywood book was inspired by his experiences when his Barfly was adapted into a movie starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. He didn't like the movie much -- he thought Rourke was a "showoff." I thought it was a good movie and wondered if part of his dislike was because he was played by a handsome man who had never suffered the agonies of being Charles Bukowski. It is probably also true that in his barfly days he was rarely fortunate enough to be the lover of a woman who looked like Faye Dunaway.

On the set one day, Dunaway turned up to question him, doing research on the character she would play.

"This woman," she asked him "What would she put under her pillow?"

"A rosary."

"What sort of perfume did she wear?"

He looked at her incredulously.

"Perfume?"

I can testify to the way his life became his fiction, because the day I spent on the set of the movie became part Hollywood, and the movie critic in the book is a fair enough portrait of me. Central to his fiction and poetry was his lifelong love-hate relationship with women; by the time his fame began to attract groupies, he complains, "it was too late."

The movie is valuable because it provides a face and a voice to go with the work. Ten years have passed since Bukowski's death, and he seems likely to last, if not forever, then longer than many of his contemporaries. He outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying, outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.

How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much. There were no shields separating the real Bukowski, the public Bukowski and the autobiographical hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that's why his work remains so immediate and affecting: The wounded man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.