The movie’s title couldn’t really be any clearer: protagonist Henry Chinaski (based on the film’s screenwriter, author and poet Charles Bukowski) is a barfly. Mickey Rourke — before his own disappearance from the mainstream — took on the role. He drinks, he writes, he fights. There are, of course, women — fellow barfly Wanda, played by Faye Dunaway, as well as publisher Tully Sorenson. In his review for the New York Times in 1987, Vincent Canby attempted to classify the film, settling on “some kind of small, classic one-of-a-kind comedy.” The movie, he added, “in spite of its occasionally stomach-turning details, is not a tragedy — and it will invite anyone who says so to step into the alley.”
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