Self-declared aspiring writer Henry Chinaski has neither qualifications, ambition nor ethics. He works as a manual laborer in factories and warehouses in order to subsidize a life of drinking, race-track betting, skirt-chasing, and most of all, writing stories that no publisher will touch.

Matt Dillon, for our money one of the most underrated actors of his generation, embodies the perfect Bukowskian doppelgänger in this irresistibly cynical adaptation. Derived from the tales of the writer’s early working life, Factotum captures all of the vulgar poeticism that was this man’s essence.