Charles Bukowski, the bard of the bar room and laureate of the lowlife, is a monumental figure in post war American fiction. As ground breaking as Hunter S Thompson, Kerouac or Burroughs at their best, Bukowski’s rejection of the American dream is still as thrilling today as it was when first published.

For me, reading books like Post Office, Factotum and Ham on Rye for the first time as a teenager was a real smack in the face that tore through all the so called ‘realist’ fiction I had been getting into. All of a sudden the ‘beats’ sounded like spoiled, entitled, deluded stoners. Bukowski depicted a world of boredom, cheap women, cheaper booze, boarding houses with thin walls and unforgiving landladies, fist fights, cruelty, madness and toil. But his was no capitulating resignation to the gods of fate, he positively raged against the indignities of life and the banal brutality of existence. And in poetry volumes like Love is a Dog From Hell and The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills he wrote some of the most poignant, heart breaking poetry since Keats, showing that beneath his legendarily battered mug and booze hound swagger there lay a damaged romantic of sorts.

With people lining up to sing his praises in the rather good documentary Bukowski: Born Into This, it’s somewhat of a surprise that Hank (as his friends called him) has been so rarely depicted in film.

Aside from a raft of short films like Horseshoe, Bukowski has been brought to life by three of Hollywood’s most interesting character actors with varying degrees of success. Ben Gazzara’s performance in Tales of Ordinary Madness allegedly enraged Bukowski, although as a pretty far gone alcoholic it is perhaps debateable whether or not Gazzara’s take on the Buk legend hit a little too close to home. One criticism I would level at his portrayal is that it lacks the absurd humour and dry wit present in both the man and his work. As although Bukowski was serious in what he said, there was always a playfulness, a sense that he wasn’t taking himself too seriously that undercut even his most profound assertions.

The next big screen outing for Bukowski, or more accurately his literary alter ego Henry Chinaski, was in Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly. With Bukowski taking a hands on role in the production and penning the script himself one would imagine Barfly to be the quintessential Buk film. Unfortunately not. A pre plastic surgery Mickey Rourke is too damn handsome in the first place, and his choice to play Chinaski as an over the top bar room joker is ill judged. Secondly, the film feels palpably flat and fails to capture the downbeat elegance of the Los Angeles that is seen in films like Chinatown and Farwell, My Lovely. Altogether Barfly is an admirable failure but worth checking out, if only as a prelude to reading Bukowski’s account of the film’s production in his 1989 novel Hollywood.

The most recent and, in my humble opinion, best portrayal of the man is Matt Dillon’s turn in Factotum, a film based on the 1975 book of the same name. With such brilliant source material it would have taken a titanic hack to mess up the movie, and thankfully Dillon’s understated performance is bang on the money. Everything from the relaxed cadence in his speech, to the starched short sleeved shirts and slicked back hair radiates the insouciance of Bukowski in his prime. In stark contrast to Rourke’s hamminess it is so refreshing to see Dillon underplay so many scenes which in the hands of a less gifted actor would have been reduced to farce or melodrama. What he so brilliantly manages to portray in Factotum is the sense of a man who has weathered so many failures, so many beatings and disappointments that he has reached an almost Zen like calm which renders all events with a sense of futility and ridiculousness. A man who craves isolation, booze and the written word above all else. A man who does not lie because to lie is to willingly enter into the machinations of a society that is fundamentally fucked up and essentially trivial. This is the Bukowski I fell in love with and Dillon saw through the superficialities of the legendary boozer and braggart to realise this. He should have won an Oscar but unsurprisingly he wasn’t even nominated and Jamie Foxx bagged one for his Ray Charles biopic. Flamin’ typical.

For anyone interested in Bukowski I would highly recommend Factotum and Bukowski: Born Into This. But above all else I would urge everyone to go to the nearest book shop or get themselves onto amazon.co.uk to pick up one of his books. Granted, he is not to everyone’s liking, but much like an extremely ripe blue cheese or Guinness, once you get a taste for Buk nothing else will quite measure up.