"Barfly" is not heavy on plot, which is correct, since in the disordered world of the drinker, one thing rarely leads to another through any visible pattern. Each day is a window that opens briefly after the hangover and before the blackout, and you can never tell what you'll see through that window... he result is a truly original American movie, a film like no other, a period of time spent in the company of the kinds of characters Saroyan and O'Neill would have understood, the kinds of people we try not to see, and yet might enjoy more than some of our more visible friends. "Barfly" is one of the year's best films.

Rourke comes through with some of his best-humored, subtle clowning. The movie, though, is bilge... Barfly might be a film about the leader of a religious cult which was made by an altar boy. Schroeder, wanting to please the Master, inadvertently exposes Bukowski’s messianic windbag sensibility at its most self-satisfied. You wouldn’t guess at Bukowski’s talent from this movie. His script is a pastiche of his earlier writing. It’s not about finding truth by living among society’s rejects—it’s about peddling that notion of truth to the well-heeled.