By Dennis Harvey

A REASONABLE RESPONSE to the presence of Bukowski: Born into This at film festivals last year was, What, more about that guy? It took some thought to realize there hasn't really been so much on film about him. Yet the immediate feeling was akin to hearing of yet another documentary about Kerouac, or the porn industry, or surfing at Mavericks. Which is to say, enough already.

Some people seem overexposed even (or especially) when the only thing about them that's gotten ubiquitous is their name, and maybe some vague idea that's become associated with them enough to become adjectival (e.g., Kafkaesque). Charles Bukowski came to personify a particular, definitive hipster-literati brand that was grasped by a whole lot of people – who may or may not have read him. Rather, those latter received the image of a skank-shagging, wino Los Angeles poet from Barfly, in which Mickey Rourke played barely fictionalized C.B. (That moment was a conspicuous high- or lowlight in the long line of bar-stool Method performances by moody male actors who give props to Buk and the beat icons offscreen too. Though it's often difficult to tell whether these thespians got artistic inspiration from those sources, or just some romantically slumming 'tude.) And from the general zeitgeist – Bukowski is so zeitgeist he probably merits a plaque in San Francisco's bar of that name.

When Bukowski finally became sorta famous after many years' slogging in the trenches of mimeographed "little magazines," well into middle age, his personality got read as much as (or more than) his books. He could be counted on to be a mean drunk, provide some spectacle, attract (inexplicably) then madden (inevitably) women who were often cracked to begin with. He was "real" in those ways only the college-educated and/or middle-class admire, because such nocturnal mess – before happy hour, he was usually sober, polite, and industrious, by all reports – looks like colorful fun from a comfortable distance one can always retreat back into.

So much hipster cachet made him a fairly rich man by his death in 1994, a cachet boosted by surprisingly large fan pockets in Germany, New Zealand, and other places he may never have bothered to visit. But the cult status that made him, period, has also been limiting: a decade later he still seems to exist to the side (as a sideshow?) of any general literary canon. Did Pulitzer and co. ever hear of him? Did it even think it needed to?

Entering the word world though some rickety back-alley door, he was never taken as seriously in the mainstream as Henry Miller, Mailer, Burroughs, Roth, Kerouac, and other libertine icons of roughly the same generation. There was never any Great American Novel candidate (at least none in conspicuous length or breadth) among his volumes; he fell in with small presses and pretty much stayed there; schmoozing was on the never-ending list of things he considered phony; he was noticed too late to ride one wave (beat) and didn't really fit the next one (counterculture lit). No wonder his mythos grew larger than his readership, which remains fanatical but somewhat isolated. There are more books about Bukowski than by him listed in the San Francisco Public Library system; most of the latter are perpetually stolen, anyway, according to my library source, a phenomenon that exists way out of proportion to other authors nation- (if not world-) wide.

One thing that's great about John Dullaghan's Bukowski: Born into This is how firmly it is about the man as a writer, rather than as a man, or a sometime train wreck, or whatever. Their frequently tortured nature aside, writers make boring movie subjects – really, what medium and its creative process could be less exciting or photogenic? (A typical way around that was illustrated by the recent Sylvia, which worshipped at the altar of Plath's every bummed private moment but offered absolutely no sense of what her writing was like, or even about.) A first-time feature director schooled in commercials (following UC Berkeley), Dullaghan has done a rare job in conveying the subject's art, not just his admittedly fascinating life and times. Of course, it helps that Bukowski was one of the most accessible non-schlock poets of the 20th century and that nearly everything he wrote (prose as well as poetry) works just fine in excerpt.

The film's fairly straight chronological approach clicks off biographical points that will be familiar to those who've read such great novels cum memoirs as Women and Post Office: craptastic childhood, bumming-around youth, day job years (15!) slogging for the United States Postal Service, key stormy fuck 'n' fight relationships, breakthrough with the L.A. Free Press column Notes of a Dirty Old Man, then more and more breakthroughs as, ironically, his life grew less and less like the slaphappy bacchanal new fans expected. (He even died of leukemia, not cirrhosis or heart failure.)

This long but beautifully assembled movie draws on a treasure trove of footage going back as far as 1972 (bringing back original documenters Barbet Schroeder and Taylor Hackford to discuss it too). Among startling moments are a serious-buzzkill verbal assault by blotto Hank (C.B.'s handle among allies) on last girlfriend Linda, who's one of many insightful commentators here. Cranky about many things (including Barfly), justifying to some degree all charges of misanthropy and misogyny, he nonetheless comes off primarily as a dedicated craftsman and secret softie.

I wish Dullaghan had found room to address the lesser-seen other Bukowski film adaptations (most notably Marco Ferreri's Tales of Ordinary Madness and Dominique Deruddere's Love Is a Dog from Hell). No room would've been preferable for that authoritative poisoner of cool, Bono. But such side attractions matter less in the end than the vivid star presence here of Bukowski's writing, whether scrolled on-screen or read aloud by himself or others: a sound of genius undercaste riffing that's coarse, witty, tender, and often funnier than a certifiable great American author should be (or, apparently, is) allowed to be.