I come to Charles Bukowski and this film about him with a notion of his legend but not his work. I leave him and this film feeling otherwise. I've yet to turn pages with his words on them, but now I've heard them spoken and in his own voice, and I feel almost like I know who he was.

This film, one of the most moving documentaries I've seen in some time, documents Henry Charles Bukowski's life. It begins at the point in which his career was such that people were filming him -- filmmakers like Taylor Hackford, Barbet Schroeder, television crews from other countries where his books were just beginning to see print -- and from there it lets him tell his story in his own words.

I was in awe listening to him speak. Of his voice, like the rough side of fine cloth, and the words themselves: so precise and perfect, moreso as the years wore on and the epithets sprinkled so liberally early on became the hooks that kept him grounded as he spoke; it was like a voice I imagine you'd hear in your head as you read his work.

He recounts his childhood -- "My father was a great literary teacher. He taught me the meaning of pain. Pain without reason" -- and the beatings that left him able to say what he meant without any pretense. Friends and acquaintances wonder how terrible his childhood actually was, at least relative to the times he grew up in, but it is clear it left an indelible imprint on Bukowski. The one word he comes back to is horror. He seems to have forgiven but has not forgotten; a trip to his old family home finds him reliving his beatings in specific details, but his voice in telling them is gentle in a manner which would almost be complacent if not for the tinge of a bittersweet smile, on his face and in the timbre of his voice. He's not one, it seems, who dwells in the past; but no, he does not forget.

That same bittersweet smile is there as he tells of his years spent working for the post office, fifteen of them, all nights after the first three, and the afternoons and evenings in which he'd write and drink and write before going to punch the clock. He was scared to stop writing. Hundreds of short stories submitted, unpublished; then poems, narrative verse that gradually found him the appreciation he most certainly sought (for while an artist can find immense satisfaction in being prolific unto oneself, it's only a matter of time before the realization that an audience is needed to complete the creative act begins to gnaw). Those poems found their way into rags; eventually he had a column in a newspaper. Then an admirer started publishing him and asked for a novel and he delivered it (his first, entitled Post Office) within three weeks. How can you do that? asked the friend. Bukowski tells him: fear.

More would come, novels and poems, and readers too. Some of the more affluent ones are quoted here: Sean Penn, Bono, Tom Waits (whose appreciation of the man is no surprise: he often sings the way Bukowski writes). So too would come more booze, but not, it seems, so much that it ever disabled him; you hear it said that he would drink five, six, seven bottles of wine, one after another, and yet calling him an alocholic would seem too harsh.

We do see one drunken outburst on film, and know that there were many more (particularly in his youth). Prior to the film, through hearsay, I had visions of a man so fueled by alcohol and rage that there was nothing but bitterness feeding his proclivity with the written word; but this was simply not so. The film reveals (perhaps not so much as his writing, I'm certain, but it's what I have to work with at the moment) a man who was indeed fueled by alcohol and who had much rage in him, but were that all there were to him, I think, there would be little to remember him by; perhaps not even a published work. He would not have lived so long (he died of leukemia in 1994 at the age of 74). He wouldn't have cried when he married Linda Lee Bukowski, who remained with him to the end, and he wouldn't have cried as he recited a poem about a former love. We see both of these breakdowns in the film, and at the end we hear him read a poem about the bluebird that beats its wings within his chest and we see photos in which his eyes twinkle and reveal the soul of a good man. His eyes, and that wide mouth and that bittersweet smile that over time seemed permanently affixed.

It's that smile, and the voice and the words that we're left with, and they work in perfect conjunction, so that you cannot imagine his writing in any other context, from any other face, in any other voice. One of the joys of the film is listening to him recite his own work; the director, John Dullaghan , certainly understood this, for we hear these recitations often. I know other people know it and I know that I'm a latecomer to a party occupied by thousands around the world. Better late than never.