Quick Take: You Never Had It: An Evening With Bukowski is at once both a wonderful portrait of the wise old drunk at the end of the bar and a sorrowful depiction of an artist relegated to continuously maintain the character that brought the success that pulled him from the world that breathed the life into his stories.

Oft times things are expected of people who create a world we long to inhabit. A world we’ve spent hours, days, even years imagining creates expectations that tinge the real human who dreamed them up to begin with. I worry this piece (and my view of this film) is entirely altered by my having spent a portion of my life imagining myself through the arms, feet, eyes, and ears of his characters. That’s the point though. That a truly transcendent artist creates a definable but vague enough canvas for us to paint ourselves into their lives and creations.

Likewise, standing on a stage you’ve dressed long enough can blur the lines of performance. The many fictional depictions of “Hank” certainly altered the light of Charles himself.

When you interact with a subject like Bukowski you must first understand that whatever it was you’d intended for your piece to be it won’t be without first being taken in and filtered by the subject into what he perceives it as.

This evening (edited to fifty-plus minutes) of revelry in a San Pedro apartment is no different. No question, no comment, is left untinged by his light.

At once both a wonderful portrait of the wise old drunk at the end of the bar and a sorrowful depiction of an artist relegated to continuously maintain the character that brought the success that pulled him from the world that breathed the life into his stories. This film is littered with one-line genius, advice, and witticism as a forest floor is with leaves in fall. A veritable graduation speech for anyone who ever dreamed of holding a pen and breathing life into paper.

The interviewer keeps begging to draw him into the more base and dime-store aspects of his writing. Something he waves a smoky hand at.

“Why is everything sex? Can’t I ride a bicycle down the street without thinking about sex? Am I an impure person because I don’t think about fucking? Is my mind wrong because I don’t have a hard-on fifty-percent of the time? I’ve got nothing against fucking, but it can be overpriced.”

“But that’s what you write!?” She retorts.

“I have fucked and I have fucked well and I’ve written well about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s very important.”

This is perhaps the truest moment of the film. Where the artist is confronted with the perception of his creation and rejects it outright.

The interviewer is asking him to roil in the muck that churned the loins of his fans and he verbally rolls his eyes and moves on.

Anyone who creates knows that when you, lantern in hand, forge the path of creation through the dark and go back and share your map, that anyone who trails after you will only experience that path through the tinged light of their experience. They are not going to feel, or learn what you did. Their path down yours is theirs, and Silvia’s was more interested in his sexual exploits than the beatings his father gave him.

Just as mine was more interested in the topography of his surroundings and the flavor of the bars he frequented than his pain of being misunderstood again and again.

He in fact addresses his female fans by saying he much more appreciates if they actually read the books, and describes sex with his girlfriend as “getting it out of the way” so he can get to the Tonight Show. Both sentiments could be taken under the popular lens of his being a misogynist, but I think this minimizes what he said earlier.

“Why is everything sex?”

He answers that with, “Because It Sells.”

“Is that the only reason?” Silvia asks.

“Of course.”

He is stating plainly and clearly that the more debauched parts of his writing weren’t to debase his work, but to appease his base.

It is just “not very important”, or at least not as important as riding a bike.

Maybe a hook to pull in and elaborate on pain. Real and true pain. To draw in with the glitter of love and the debauch the whole affair with a seven-chapter diatribe about child abuse.

He later regales Silvia with a story about an attractive woman he encountered at a party, while his girlfriend looks down and away clearly disappointed. Maybe thinking back to only a few minutes prior when his description of their sensuality could have easily been used to describe a bowel movement, and imagining to herself that when he said that sex wasn’t that important, he meant theirs too.

He did. He said so.

“Writers are very despicable people. Plumbers are better. Used car salesmen are better. They’re all more human than writers. Writers save their humanity till they sit down to a typewriter, then they become good people or exceptional people. Get them away from a typewriter, they’re pricks. I’m a writer.”

So sitting there without a typewriter he is telling you exactly what to expect of him. He is telling you precisely who you should expect him to be. That any humanity he had had been typed into his work long ago and if you needed it it was there. He sees the world that way, but it is through his story of the Hemingway picture that you can see how he sees himself at this point in his life. When he shows the picture of a literary icon none of us should see. An intimate portrait of how success taints genius. It might as well be Kerouac or London. It wouldn’t mean anything different either way.

Because, “Talking to another writer is like drinking water in a bathtub.” Sure, the glass is fresher, but isn’t the soil washed from the surface what you wanted from them all along?

To be able to get drunk with Chuck through the lens of a camera is quite a spin. The kind that blindfolds you, and leaves you dizzy, bat in hand in front of a paper mâché version of who you thought you were and begs you to try and find the person so covered with who we wanted him to be. So don’t.

“Don’t try.” Watch.

“Somebody asked me: “What do you do? How do you write, create?” You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it.”