First-time director John Dullaghan spent seven years researching his documentary film “Bukowski: Born Into This” (Magnolia Pictures, 2003), and it was time well spent: a charitable gift to literature, philosophy and modern culture.

Dullaghan’s “Bukowski” is the first and only comprehensive documentary covering the life and work of Los Angeles writer and poet Charles Bukowski. The documentary depicts new and archival film clips accompanied with a fantastic array of photographs that have not been widely seen, from Bukowski’s childhood to his death, from public and private readings, from drunken parties to sentimental and philosophical interviews, from his struggles, sufferings and rage to his success, fame and graceful last days.

“Born Into This” is not a chronological story of Bukowski’s life; however, Dullaghan takes the viewer chronologically through Bukowski’s writing, which reveals his life story.

Dullaghan introduces Bukowski as a man who excessively used alcohol to elevate himself out of pain and wandering, while maintaining the discipline of his craft and art, and who later found serenity in moderation.

On Bukowski’s tombstone is written “Don’t Try,” which became the maxim for a man who simply and honestly “was” nothing more than what he was: a writer who nurtured his writing effortlessly. Writing was Bukowski’s tranquility from a life of ugliness, which was both personal and impersonal.

The superficial reader of Bukowski too often considers him a brutish, sexist drunk: a hard-drinking, tough-fighting writer who is immaturely concerned with the battle between the sexes. However, Dullaghan’s documentary illuminates a more profound understanding of Bukowski’s life and work.

Anyone who has ever spent any serious time with Bukowski’s prose and poetry or takes the time to watch Dullaghan’s film may discover that Bukowski was a philosopher of the “ugly,” that is, he was a man who was so physically hideous that as an adolescent and adult he was shunned and outcast, simply because he was not good-looking. In fact, he was cursed in the area of physical appearance, smitten with acne vulgaris. Abused as a child and growing facially repulsive, he sunk deep into reflection and observation, subsequently developing a sage-like understanding for that which is ugly, for those who were unwanted and for the gross absurdities of superficial beauty, and he did so without affectation.

Bukowski never veers from the ugly in his life or in his writings. The gods favored him with the strength to pound and ponder the ugly into knowledge and wisdom, as he roamed a growing industrialized and technological America, which demanded that a person act like an asshole to get a job.

Bukowski may indeed have been the most physically hideous writer of the 20th century (along with Jean Paul Sartre, who also wrote about the ugly), and he may also have been the most prolific poet of the time; therefore, developed a writing style that “had no time for metaphor.” He was a man who had pretense beaten out of him by a cruel and abusive world, particularly located in a city were image is everything: Los Angeles, the city where he cultivated and polished his ability to grapple with and understand pain without reason.

Los Angeles being the epicenter of Walt Disney’s creation, Mickey Mouse, was particularly insulting and grotesque to Bukowski. One of Bukowski’s publishers, William Packard (New York Quarterly), justified his belief in Bukowski, recounting that Mickey Mouse tried to make everything cute and nice while “Bukowski was devoted to the de-Disneyfication of us all. Someone had to kick the Mickey Mouse out of our heads.”

Linda Lee, Bukowski’s wife, described further, “He despised Mickey Mouse. He could not handle the fact that the power over multi-millions of human beings was in the hands of this three-fingered foolish creature that taught you nothing whatsoever, expressing nothing real … total absurd fucking fantasy … not even good or something creative. Bukowski was appalled by Mickey Mouse. ‘Mickey Mouse does not have a fucking soul!’”

Bukowski’s critique of Mickey Mouse was indicative of a society that was engineering a populace who mistook callousness and indifference for niceness, and who would not consider the ugly within themselves and in all that which was good and bad. A society that wished to live in a Pleasantville was a fantasy designed by a mouse. And Bukowski could not abide such a lie.

Bukowski is too often celebrated as a “dirty old man”: a phrase that defined him in the title of his column for “Open City.” To merely tag Bukowski as such is wide of the point and narrow in scope. Bukowski was a writer and poet who did not believe that the value of a human being could be determined by the market place or celebrity or wealth, or by prestige and/or “good” breeding. He lived with the dregs, outcasts, poor and unwashed drunks, while never romanticizing them. Bukowski may be more likened to a Transcendental Junk Yard Dog, the Cynic of the Beat Generation, but was never a member of the Beat Writers. He searched for the oversoul of his own being in the City of Angels, which was constantly teetering its pathos between losing its soul and discovering its fame.

Of particular interest in this documentary is the birth of John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press, which could not have existed without Bukowski.

“Bukowski: Born Into This” chronicles the journey of the “King of the Little Magazines” to become a distinguished international writer, who is translated into over 20 languages. Charles Bukowski could best be described as the working-class writer who grew beautiful and wise with age despite such an ugly beginning.

John Dullaghan’s “Bukowski: Born Into This” can be purchased from Amazon or rented from Netflix.