Tales That Defy the Ordinary

Sharp takes on film, culture, history, nostalgia, and the curious corners of human life. With side-glances at nature, thought, and satire. Jackdaw Posts isn’t your average blog. Not quite a magazine.

But always worth the read.

Barfly (1987): God Drinks Down Here Too

Some films shimmer. This one sweats. Barfly doesn’t walk—it staggers. Smells like bourbon, sounds like teeth grinding, looks like a poem Bukowski wrote after vomiting into a typewriter.

There’s no redemption here. Just barstools, ashtrays, and the slow rot of dignity in a world that doesn’t ask much but still takes everything. It’s not a rise-and-fall story. It’s a fall-and-fall-slower.

 

Barstool gospel in neon—light it up, drink it down. Image credit unsplash.com/@benjeeeman

Piss-Stained Paradise

This is Charles Bukowski’s underworld, where daylight is the enemy and hangovers are sacred. He called it autobiographical fiction. Hollywood cleaned it just enough to sell the ticket, but the stink still lingers.

Mickey Rourke plays Henry Chinaski—Bukowski’s whiskey-soaked avatar—as if he were possessed by a drunken raccoon in a stolen sports coat. He slurs, snarls, and leans his way through a life of cheap drinks, cheaper fights, and even cheaper philosophy. Somehow, it works. Rourke is repellent, magnetic, and just theatrical enough to remind you this is cinema, not a court document.

Faye Dunaway is Wanda. She plays broken like it’s a form of art. Elegant in the ruins. They meet, they drink, they try to out-fail each other. Love isn’t the word. Codependency with jazz hands, maybe.

The bars are always dark, the lights always buzzing, the days melting into each other like a bad dream you wake up drunk inside. Director Barbet Schroeder doesn’t so much shoot the film as marinate it—everything’s soaked in sweat, smoke, and sour breath. It’s ugly. And honest.

What Works: Truth, Tragedy, and a Bit of Vomit

  • Mickey Rourke plays Chinaski like a feral theatre kid doing Camus in a dive bar. You want to punch him and buy him a drink. Possibly both.

  • Faye Dunaway is better than the film deserves. Fragile, vicious, barely holding it together. There's real hurt behind her eyes.

  • The script (written by Bukowski himself) stumbles with style. It isn’t clean, but neither is life. Some lines feel tossed off; others crack your ribs.

  • The bars are the real stars. Dim, miserable, and weirdly inviting. You can smell the spilled beer through the screen.

  • Tone: the film knows it's not romantic. There’s no glamour here. Just survival.

What Fails: Wobble, Waste, and Bukowski by Numbers

  • Rourke’s performance occasionally tips into caricature. Less “tortured writer,” more “man doing Bukowski cosplay after five pints.”

  • Pacing: Even at 97 minutes, it drags. Scenes repeat themselves emotionally—drunk, fight, sulk, write, repeat.

  • Lack of shape: It doesn’t build. It just exists. That’s true to life, sure, but a little exhausting for cinema.

  • The so-called plot disappears by act two. Nothing wrong with vibes over story, but Barfly flirts with aimlessness.

  • Women—aside from Dunaway’s Wanda—are background noise or punchlines. Bukowski’s world, yes, but still feels narrow.

Bukowski’s LA: The Real Underbelly

Barfly is Bukowski mythologised. The real Charles never looked like Rourke and never moved that quickly. But his voice—cynical, comic, shot through with despair—that voice comes through.

The LA of Barfly isn’t palm trees and convertibles. It’s cheap motels, day drinking, broken jukeboxes. These people aren’t chasing fame. They’re hiding from life. And that’s why it works. For every film about making it in Hollywood, Barfly is about choosing not to even try.

It’s also the last gasp of an America before rehab chic. Before craft cocktails and TED talks about “the power of vulnerability.” This isn’t curated sadness. This is drowning on purpose.

The Soundtrack: Jazz, Junk, and Jukebox Ghosts

The music drifts in like stale cigarette smoke. No big themes. Just piano here, sax there, a distant blues song bleeding through bar walls. Perfect. Forgettable in the best way. It lets the misery talk.

The Director: Barbet the Enabler

Schroeder keeps it simple. He’s not here to stylise ruin. He lets Bukowski’s script do the work—and it mostly does. No gimmicks. Just long takes, tired faces, and rooms where everyone looks like they’ve slept in their own clothes since ’79.

The Real Bukowski: Barstool Prophet or Self-Made Myth?

Before Mickey Rourke lit a cigarette in Barfly, Charles Bukowski had already burned half his life away in dive bars, flophouses, and mailrooms. He wasn’t playing drunk—he was drunk. Not in a sexy, tortured-genius way, but in a piss-stained, blood-in-the-sink sort of way.

He called himself "Hank Chinaski" in his books. A hard-drinking, woman-chasing, low-life philosopher who wrote about vomiting, poetry, and existential rot with the same level of care. He typed like he was hitting back at the world.

But here's the trick: he was good.
Beneath the puke and porn, Bukowski knew how to land a line that hurt. His prose was raw, fast, funny, and true. He could boil a lifetime of misery down to six words and still leave room for a punchline.

“We are here to drink beer.
We are here to kill war.
We are here to laugh at the odds.”

He was working class and proud. Post Office drone for a decade. Bounced from job to job, bed to bed, bottle to bottle. He didn’t want your sympathy. He wanted you to admit it—life is mostly terrible and mostly funny, and if you can say that out loud, you’ve already won.

But let’s not canonise the man. Bukowski could be cruel. Misogynistic. Repetitive. Sometimes a self-parody. The last decade of his life saw him rich, bloated, and purring at cats in a fancy L.A. home. The rawness stayed, but the desperation got comfortable.

Barfly was his attempt to mythologise himself—Bukowski filtered through Bukowski, played by someone else pretending to be Bukowski. A snake drinking its own tail. But even then, the sadness leaks through.

You don’t have to like him. You don’t even have to like his work.                                                        But you can’t ignore the man who made suffering sound like jazz.

The Verdict: A Love Letter Written in Spilled Beer

Barfly doesn’t entertain. It lingers. It stains. It laughs at itself and then throws up on your shoes.

It’s not a great film. But it’s a truthful one. And truth, when it smells this bad, deserves a second look.

But you can’t ignore the man who made suffering sound like jazz.

Final Score: 6.5/10
Like waking up on the floor of a bar you don’t remember walking into. Ugly. Honest. Still here.


 
Barfly (1987) – Official Trailer via Film Trailer Channel on YouTube
Watch the original trailer for Barfly, featuring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. Grit, booze, and Bukowski in under two minutes.

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