Woke up this morning and it seemed to me,
That every night turns out to be
A little more like Bukowski.
And yeah, I know he's a pretty good read.
But God who'd wanna be?
God who'd wanna be such an asshole?

-- Modest Mouse, "Bukowski"

Hank Chinaski (Matt Dillon) is drunk. Hank Chinaski is unreliable. Hank Chinaski would like very much to be Henry Chinaski, author. Hank Chinaski is Charles Bukowski -- or, more accurately, served as Bukowski's stand-in for himself in his 1975 novel Factotum. That book is now a movie, and it is a bracing shot-and-a-chaser affair of whisky and stupidity. Directed by Brent Hamer (Eggs and Kitchen Stories) and co-written by Hamer and longtime indie producer Jim Stark, Factotum is a film depicting a man's alcoholic collapse, but it's cut to make it look like he's dancing.
Factotum (briefly defined as "A man who performs many jobs" in a helpful opening title) follows Hank through his days weaving and stumbling about a flat Midwestern cityscape drinking, smoking and writing. Dillon plays Chinaski as befuddled and beefy, like an old-model American muscle car that's been idling a while. Chinaski takes in the world with the infinite patience of the well and truly drunk, and turns it into prose that wears a stout jacket of blue-collar sincerity over a frame of shivering poetry: "The lives people live are driving them crazy, and it comes out in how they drive."

 

I heard Bingham Ray talking about this film in the other day. He loved it, he told a friend, and was very proud of Matt Dillon's performance in it. "It's a whole new Matt," Ray assured a skeptical friend. But I'm not sure that's accurate. Look at the path Dillon has trod over the past 25 years: from Over the Edge to Midnight Cowboy, from There's Something About Mary to Crash, I simply don't think it would be a stretch to say that Charles Bukowski is/was/wrote the role that Dillon was born to play. He immerses himself completely into this thing, from the limp to the monotone slur. But Factotum, based on Bukowski's second novel about the slow and sordid misadventures of one Henry Chinaski, isn't just an actor's showcase. By highlighting Bukowski's self-mocking humor, director Bent Hamer turns Chinaski into a much more sympathetic character than the played by Mickey Rourke in Barfly. You don't just feel sorry for this Hank – in fact, at times, you sort of want to have a beer with him.

Factotum the film is more or less faithful to Factotum the book – which is to say, it's less interested in the story it's telling than in the language used to tell it. There's a part where Chinaski tells us, over voiceover, that he's confident that he can outwrite just about anyone – but the image we see, whilst he's telling us this, is of Dillon stumbling down a late night street, and into a sleazy bar. It's the inherent contradiction of the film: Chinaski/Bukowski is perfectly to hold court over his sleazy little world, and to generally approach the trials of existence with a total policy of passive resistance – even though an outplan is easily visible on the other side.

And so he hops from one menial non-career to another: he drives an ice truck (straight to a bar to get drunk) ; he bottles pickles (until he's fired for showing up drunk); he applies for a job as a newspaper reporter and gets one as a janitor (and then skips out on his first shift to – say it with me know – get drunk). All the while, the Great American Novel chugs along, a pile of loose leaf pages scrawled on in longhand, sitting amidst empty bottles on the corner of his desk.