Through a glass, darkly: Dillon re-creates Charles Bukowski's alter ego

Seeing Matt Dillon buff, crisp and handsome at the Academy Awards this year, anxious to find out if he'd take home a best supporting actor Oscar for "Crash" (he didn't), it would have been hard to imagine him just a few months before as a bloaty, flushed, disheveled lush, wearily clinging to a tattered barstool.

That's where he was between completing the harrowing ensemble collage of "Crash" and the pleasant comedy-a-trois of "You, Me and Dupree." In a daring dramatic sidestep that may well earn him another Oscar nod — this time for leading actor — Dillon immersed himself in the booze-soaked underworld of Henry Chinaski. Chinaski is literary alter-ego to the late novelist and poet Charles Bukowski and has become a hero for legions of angry, under-appreciated writers who'd rather do anything than work. With controlled rage, bitterness and burning obsession, Dillon shows nervy force in bringing Chinaski to unbalanced life in "Factotum."

"Factotum," opening Friday, is a boldly original collaboration between Dillon, Norwegian director Bent Hamer and co-screenwriter Jim Stark. It's a tough movie, and for those who've seen the trailer, distinctly less comic than the distributor might have you believe.

Speaking by phone, with the gruff intelligence of the serious actor (and director) he's grown into since his teenage debut more than 25 years ago, Dillon is aware of the disparity between what people familiar with Bukowski's work may expect and what the filmmakers have brought to the screen.

"Undeniably there's a darkness to it," he says. "It's very grim in some ways, but there's also humor deep down there."

Grim hardly describes the life of Hank Chinaski, a man who lives from paycheck to severance to unemployment payments working a string of nothing jobs that include janitor, commercial ice handler, factory laborer and quality assurance inspector at a pickle-packaging plant. His vocation is the very definition of factotum.

"I think Hank very much is one of those people where the individual takes precedence over all else," says Dillon of what may be his most nuanced, repellant, yet incongruously endearing character yet. And that includes the hateful, finely shaded cop that gained him Oscar notice in "Crash."

Through Hank Chinaski, Dillon paints a plainly autobiographical condensation of Bukowski's life as a habitué of the sleazy bars and flophouses of Los Angeles when he was in his 30s, 40s and 50s. The movie is updated to the margins of a drab, unnamed modern-day city (it was filmed in Minneapolis). Even considering its loose structure, it is faithfully based on a novel of the same name, drawing additional material from some of the author's short stories.

Unlike the 1987 movie "Barfly," which starred Mickey Rourke as Hank and was adapted by Bukowski from another of his eponymous novels, "Factotum" is a grittier portrayal of the author's exploits. Dillon's Chinaski is less happy-go-lucky. The movie's outlook through the eyes of a full-time drunk with a passion to publish the tortured philosophy of his soul is all the more brazen for its off-handed darkness.

Though they could have been kindred spirits, Dillon never met Bukowski. He fashioned his Chinaski on the existing visual record of Bukowski and by voraciously rereading. Bukowski wrote hundreds of short stories amidst bouts of boozing, gambling and womanizing, along with thousands of poems and six novels, all published by his beloved Black Sparrow Press.

"I had read most of his novels and short stories when I was in my early 20s, and they really spoke to me at that time," says Dillon. "I was always drawn to books with those kinds of existentialist characters. I went back and read the poetry, which I wasn't interested in when I was younger. I thought it was very beautiful. It covered some of the same ground but in a deeper more soulful way. The things I got from him when I reread him all these years later was the vulnerability, the shyness that was there, and this kind of hunger, this need to be a successful writer. It wasn't like it all just happened and he had nothing to do with it."

Dillon also watched archival footage, including the documentaries "Bukowski" (1973) and the well-regarded 2003 release "Bukowski: Born Into This."

"The thing about playing someone who really existed is there's all this source material to draw from," he says. "One of the things that I drew from him through the body language was the kind of defeated quality, like he'd surrendered to the physical world. There's a kind of grace in this acknowledgement that he's not going to ever find himself in, like, an aerobics class or something. He is who he is and is comfortable with that. His mind is sharp, but his body has been pretty much undone by the material world."

Bukowski's widow was a big booster for Dillon's role as her late husband. "When I spoke to Linda Bukowski I had my concerns that people would think I wasn't enough of a physical type," he says. But she assured him he'd make a wonderful Hank.

"As far as any kind of physical transformation ... I shaved my hairline back a little bit and let myself go just like the character of Hank did," Dillon said.

It's hard to know whether he's joking or not from the inflected menace that occasionally flashes through in the impish humor of Henry Chinaski when Dillon says, "I also went out and got drunk for three days."

Ted Fry: tedfry@hotmail.com