Barfly (1987)

It may be hard to remember now that Mickey Rourke was once a creamy-skinned sex god whose underplayed purr drove audiences nuts in the early '80s. But that's why his career triumph as a thinly veiled Charles Bukowski in this 1987 laugh riot is all the more cheering. Stringy-haired, with a cannonball potbelly poking out of his wifebeater, Rourke's Henry Chinaski throws dollars at the pit-bull bartender (Frank Stallone) who torments him, crooning, "Go buy yourself some bubble gum!" When asked what he has against the musclehead saloonkeeper who whips him in bar fights, Chinaski sighs, "He represents everything I hate: obviousness, unoriginal macho energy." Rourke's Buke represents the height of original macho energy, the actor's trademark whisper turned into the attempted sneer of a very drunken Popeye. I must say that I generally have no love for Bukowskiana--but this, the author's wry self-parody, is the exception. In Barfly, the poet's self-romanticized alcoholism and auto-destruct aesthetic is robbed of the reverse glamour that makes Bukowski's mythos a staple for junior-varsity poseurs the world over. With Bukowski's autobiographical screenplay, Rourke and director Barbet Schroeder go for Skid Row slapstick; even that diva's diva Faye Dunaway joins the party as an aging stringbean dipsomaniac. It's rare for a European director to faithfully reproduce the vibe of an American city, but Schroeder gets at the heart of downtown L.A., creating a stirring Drunko's Last Stand that's poignant, piercing, and inexplicably clear-eyed. (Matthew Wilder)