Charles Bukowski spent fourteen years sorting mail at a Los Angeles post office before he became known as a poet and novelist, and this film pieces his life together from childhood beatings by his father through decades of heavy drinking, dead-end jobs, and wrecked relationships to his eventual standing as an underground literary icon. Director John Dullaghan spent seven years on the project, and the interviews he gathered range wide: relatives, neighbors, childhood friends, former post office coworkers, girlfriends, and fellow poets, plus admirers like Bono, Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, Barbet Schroeder, and Taylor Hackford, who directed the film adaptation of Bukowski's novel 'Barfly'. The film draws a line from the abuse and poverty of his early years to the voice that produced 'Post Office', 'Women', and 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man', without smoothing over the drinking or the difficulty of the people around him. It sits closer to oral history than tribute, letting the people who actually knew him describe the gap between the myth and the man.