W.H. Auden wrote, “Our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet…he is also a character in our biography.”

Tom Waits compares finding Charles Bukowski’s writing in the underground L.A. Free Press to finding treasure in the trash: he had to search for him. John Martin, Bukowski’s future publisher, recalls discovering his work while searching for contemporary writers who typified the great American literary tradition of Whitman, Melville, Henry James, Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bono describes his love for American culture and literature, particularly the Beats, and how he came upon Bukowski’s writing at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. The painter Michael Cano describes randomly opening War All The Time at a bookstore to the poem “Oh, Yes.” John Dullaghan’s documentary Bukowski: Born Into This places a great deal of importance upon these first, intense and personal moments of discovery.

Bukowski, himself a writer who was not a member of any particular artistic movement or group, has always attracted people on the fringes of society, outsiders. The cult of Buk is not composed of intellectuals, academics, students, and critics but, rather non-readers, artists, and unconventional, disgruntled radicals, the unwanted loners. When two readers of Bukowski discover one another there is a recognition of shared experience: they both know the man. Charles Bukowski died in 1994, when I was still in high school. He soon thereafter became a major character in my life when I happened to read his obituary in, of all places, a glossy, trashy, celebrity-obsessed gossip magazine like Entertainment Weekly, the last place you’d expect to find him, quite a journey from the cheaply printed, grungy, underground magazines of his heyday. When I began reading Bukowski, starting off with his novels, his writings spoke to me, they were like the ravings of a hilarious, drunken prophet, a working class madman who spoke for the disillusioned and marginalized. Bukowski’s is a tough voice—a howl, a scream—belligerent and forceful, yet capable of creating elegant poetry. Bukowski’s thinly veiled, semi-autobiographical tales are glorious hymns to all human vices (gambling, alcohol, sex, profanity, smoking, vulgarity, violence).

Dullaghan’s documentary portrait of the legendary underground writer full of balls, fury, booze, and poetry is the result of seven years of research, filming, and over 150 interviews. A surprisingly tender tribute to Bukowski’s humanity and analysis of the wild man legend that he cultivated, the film documents his years wandering the country as a common laborer, the 14 years he spent working at a Los Angeles post office, and his final success as a writer. There is extraordinary archival footage of Bukowski’s poetry readings, his drunken debauchery, his belligerence, his profanity, and occasional bouts of violence. There is Bukowski attacking his wife during an on camera interview in 1986, yet his hostility and anger are undercut by the numerous tales of his kindness. At public readings Bukowski barks out requests for more booze and threatens audience members. At an infamous City Lights reading, a drunk and always sardonic Bukowski says, “You have my soul and I have your money.” The film depicts an unexpectedly compassionate image of the man. Buk bursts into tears in one clip as he reads a poem he wrote for a woman, a rare view of his sensitive side. “Forget the image,” he says in one interview, “I have a heart.”

“Some people never go crazy,” he once wrote, “what truly horrible lives they must lead.” Bukowski’s tales of ordinary madness liberated poetry and literature, reclaiming them for the outcasts of society, the derelicts, the workers, the rejected. Dullaghan’s film is an excellent collection of interviews with Bukowski, dramatic readings of his work, interviews with his wife, Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, the filmmakers Barbet Schroeder and Taylor Hackford, and also features Robert Crumb drawings which were created to illustrate his writing. Particularly exciting is the footage of Bukowski giving a guided tour of his old mail route and the home where he was raised by a brutal, sadistic father. Although it is a rather standard, celebratory documentary, this moving and thoughtful portrait contains many intimate revelations for his fans. For curious first-timers, this first full-length documentary on Bukowski is an excellent introduction to one of the most important and underappreciated voices in all of American literature.

One of the first images of Bukowski in the film is a shot of him taking a long swig off a bottle and then screaming at the camera, “What do you want motherfuck?” Hank, the “dirty old man,” to his legion of fans, is a hero of near mythological proportions. Through his short stories, poetry, and novels like Post Office, Women, Ham on Rye, and his screenplay for the film Barfly, Bukowski became the voice of the discontents of a cynical working class. For alienated laborers, for the dispossessed, for street people who didn’t have a voice of their own, Bukowski represented an original form of outsider literature, a new liberation and frankness in writing, a poetic, gruff, urban mentality which ripped apart all notions of good taste and propriety. Over the course of his lifetime he would publish over 45 works of poetry and prose portraying himself as a bum philosopher, a charming womanizer, and bumbling drunk. There is revolt in his writing against the fundamental absurdity and wrongness of morality and work, a contempt for the basic virtues, a voice for the exiled and powerless. In the film, Steve Richmond, a poet and friend of Bukowski, sums up the man’s philosophy: “If your parents begin to like your work it’s getting bad and if the cops are around something good must be happening. What you need is life, your work has to be alive. Drink, write, and fuck. That was his advice.” —KEVIN CURTIS