You Never Had It: An Evening With Charles Bukowski

A night drinking with Charles Bukowski, the late poet and alcoholic, brings with it images of flailing bar fights and back alley hugs, a romanticized version of Skid Row. By 1981, it really meant hanging out in his apartment with his increasingly respectable friends. Overindulgence was still on the agenda, but in brief documentary You Never Had It: An Evening With Charles Bukowski, there's something oddly performative – muscle memory, rather than urge.

Much like The Times of Bill Cunningham, the recent biography of the New York Times photocolumnist, You Never Had It relies on a lost interview: In this case, a drunken evening with the professional barfly and his soon-to-be long-suffering second wife Linda Lee (who he refers to as "my nurse"), accompanied by friend and photographer Michael Montfort and his wife, and Italian journalist Silvia Bizio and her camera crew. Bizio, as she explains in a brief introduction, had a track record of wrangling the poet, and been hired by an Italian TV station to interview him in his Los Angeles den, and the result was a night's worth of U-Matic 3/4 inch tapes that were never broadcast.

The hours of content are reduced down by Borgardt (not coincidentally, Bizio's son) to a little over half an hour of interviews, bolstered by Bukowski recitations over new 16mm images of the kind of down-and-out Los Angeles with which he is associated. There's a strange lack of context in the brevity: After all, 1981 was an important year for Bukowski, who recently had given up his beloved East L.A. for the tonier streets of San Pedro, and was on the verge of publishing Ham on Rye, his introspective semi-autobiographical novel about the pre-drinking childhood of his literary avatar, Henry Chinaski. By this point, he was no longer the former post office worker who lived the realness to which the Beat Poets could only aspire. Instead, he was professionally Bukowski, living up to his own myth.

If you don't already know his work, You Never Had It may be opaque. However, that's deliberate. Much like Mark Bozek with The Times of Bill Cunningham, Borgardt doesn't even glance at being a definitive history, but more a well-executed portrait – not even that, a character sketch. The ease of Bukowski's friendship with Bizio cuts through all the expository noise, so that he can talk about love, and writing, and privacy, and most especially the ridiculousness of his reputation as a deranged drunk, smashing out novels on his Royal Model HH with one hand and chugging from a bottle Liebfraumilch clasped in the other. "You can't do all that stuff," he intones, "it'll wear you out." The expectation of degeneracy, as was so often the way with the hard-living, hard-drinking writers for whom he became an icon, was the cost of his fame.