Barfly (1987)

Recommended

USA

Feature Film

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Writer: Charles Bukowski

Cinematographer: Robby Müller

Composer: Jack Baran

Cast: Mickey Rourke, Faye Dunaway, Alice Krige, Jack Nance, J.C. Quinn, Frank Stallone

From an original screenplay by Bukowski, featuring his fictional alter ego Henry Chinaski, this grubbily entertaining film – a typically unromantic portrait of a poverty row writer, who spends more time drinking and fighting and moving house than actually creating works of art – is, for its first two thirds at least, blackly comic and thoroughly entertaining. Iain.Stott