Film
Bukowski: Born into This
The cult of Charles Bukowski, based as it is on reverence for the drunken down-and-out poet who speaks the truth, is ready-made fodder for both celebrities as well as hipsters seeking literary street cred. This successful form of middle-class exoticism, in turn, has turned off many who see Bukowski as a one-trick pony, and a drunken one at that.
While some may still leave John Dullaghan’s thorough and deft documentary Bukowski: Born Into This with that same singular impression, there’s no doubt the film enriches our understanding of this celebrated character, moving well beyond the simplified kudos Bukowski has received for being a hard-drinking, roughneck poet of the streets. Unlike some of the Beats, Bukowski was not some ivy-league dropout rambler whose manuscripts are bought by the likes of Ethan Hawke for small fortunes. Rather, the celebrities interviewed in the film—including Tom Waits, Sean Penn, and Bono—seem to have a sincere appreciation, if not love, for the tortured, acerbic writer. In the priceless archival footage the filmmaker has obviously scoured for the world over, Bukowski comes off as sincerely disdainful of pretty much everything but at the same time piquantly insightful. At one point when asked about love he says, "Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality."
As someone who went from a brutalized childhood to chronic alcoholism, Bukowski was incredibly disciplined. He accomplished the almost-superhuman feat of writing every day, this while working at an automaton job in the post office for 15 years and also while drinking as much as he did. One is not sure if it’s the Teutonic blood or the pickled innards that kept him going. But one suspects that it is the "small ember" to write that he kept aglow through the hardest of times—this characteristic, as he explains in one interview, made writing for Bukowski, much like drinking, not a choice but a necessity.
While Dullaghan’s film is a paean of sorts it doesn’t hold back from including footage of an enraged, irrational man whose profanity was rife and who was obviously a handful for those who tried to be with him for any extended period. Sure, Bukowski: Born Into This could be a bit shorter, and it probably should have been. Yet, like many films that take years to make and are labors of love, the filmmaker is doing a service to literary history by showing the man himself behind the myth. And while the Ivory Tower may look down on this character’s work, Bukowski’s rough and tumble mix of hard-living and accessible poetic insights certainly puts him in a different class from most alcoholics. Here’s to a drinker with incredible self-discipline and a grand mission.
Bukowski: Born Into This
A film by John Dullaghan
Magnolia Pictures
Opens June 4th at Cinema Village, New York
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Steffani Jemison’s A Rock, A River, A Street
By Tara Aisha WillisMARCH 2023 | Art Books
Reading A Rock, A River, A Street is like finding a way through an enigmatic moment of performance: the body is the thing that connects feelings and experiences, moves us through them. It is a train of thought, a largely unvoiced internal monologue to which we are given partial access.
78. (416 East 55th Street)
By Raphael RubinsteinNOV 2021 | The Miraculous
A painter who was a USAAF bomber pilot during the Second World War recounts to two of his poet friends how on several occasions he flew a famous movie star around North Africa. His friends dont believe him until one day in the early 1960s when the three of them get invited to a party for the launch of a book the actress has written. The two poets are delighted because they will finally be able to prove that their painter friend simply made up his connection to the glamorous star. As they walk into the private club where the party is taking place, they espy the actress seated at a circular banquet talking with several people. She looks up as they approach and the painter makes a small hand gesture, the slightest of waves. She immediately responds with a smile and calls out to him by name and with a big How are you? His friends are so shocked he thinks they are may pass out.
77. (249 Lafayette Street, 57th Street)
By Raphael RubinsteinNOV 2021 | The Miraculous
At the age of 38 an Argentinian artist who has abandoned a law career to become a painter moves to New York City where he rents a studio in Little Italy and supports himself by working as a waiter at the Caffe Figaro on Bleecker Street. The same year he has his debut solo show in the city and moves his studio to 248 Lafayette Street. The following year he has his breakthrough idea of leaving the front of his paintings solid white and applying color only to the sides. When he shows one of his first sides only paintings at a 57th Street gallery, an art critic who visits the show climbs onto a chair to see if the top edge of work has also been painted. (It has.)
59. (Coney Island, 42nd Street, the Meatpacking District, among other locations)
By Raphael RubinsteinJUNE 2021 | The Miraculous
Deserted by his parents at a young age, subjected to abuse by his supposed caregivers, a New Jersey teenager finally has no option but to drop out of school and run away to New York City where he survives, barely and dangerously, as a street hustler. Now in his mid-20s and trying to make his way as an artist he embarks on a project that takes him back to many of the locations where he used to sell his body for sex: the places I had hung out in as a kid, he later explains, the places I starved in or haunted.