William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

critics:

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

4.5

5

users:

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

4.5

5

A true revolutionary isn't universally loved; there should be plenty of hate to go around. Otherwise, how authentic could the rebellion have been? In Yony Leyser's sketchy, worshipful portrait, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, there are plenty of words tossed around about how outside the boundaries Burroughs operated - but these all come from people who either idolized or befriended him. Considering that Burroughs penned Naked Lunch, one of the most viciously repellent satirical novels in Western literature, such a friendly, speak-no-ill attitude feels off.

Leyser doesn't present an authorial voice, preferring to let the dark master's acolytes tell the story. What biographical information there is - Burroughs's 1914 birth into a St. Louis family of means, Harvard education and entry into the postwar beatnik literary demimonde - is shot swiftly into the film by Peter Weller's spare narration. Weller, who played the Burroughs stand-in Bill Lee in David Cronenberg's fascinating deconstruction of Naked Lunch, appears as well, expounding with some erudition on Burroughs' insights into the psyche of addiction. There are nods to the different periods in Burroughs's life, from the years in Tangiers to his time in the New York scene (living in the infamous "Bunker" near CBGBs at the height of punk) and later semi-retirement to the college town of Lawrence, Kansas (some scenes included of the gentlemen at leisure with his arsenal of guns and many cats) but a cohesive storyline or thoughtful intellectual framework never gels.

Unlike many docu-portraits of artistic lions, A Man Within is replete with footage of the man himself, which just about makes up for an otherwise ramshackle structure. Starting out with audio of Burroughs considering the ways in which "death smells," Leyser layers his interviews onto a dense background of scratchy film of Burroughs conversing in his gentleman of awkwardness manner with the likes of his close friend Allen Ginsberg (whose 1997 death preceded that of Burroughs by only a few months), hanging about with the musicians who made pilgrimages to see him or delivering monologues into lonely microphones. That dusty death rattle of his is all over, couched in the same drear and funereal tones whether he's railing against some injustice or delivering some dry, scabrous comic routine of the kind that promises tears instead of laughter. Leyser includes the main of his seminal "Thanksgiving Day Prayer," as stunning a denunciation of the betrayal of America's promise ("thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams") as ever spoken.

But in the main, Leyser's film is a litany of fans (mostly musicians and artists of note, particularly first-generation New York punks like Patti Smith and Thurston Moore) coming forward to talk about what they loved about Burroughs. Divided somewhat chunkily into sections about different areas of his life, from "junk" to guns (two things he loved to a damning fault), the film doesn't paint a portrait so much as it accumulates a critical mass of opinion that hopes to add up to a sound and presentable whole. Nearly to a one, the invited guests refuse to disturb the mood and so contort themselves to find ways to explain away Burroughs's possibly-accidental shooting of his wife that it would be interesting to see what crime many of them wouldn't excuse him for.

Some who knew the man better - like his longtime companion and literary executor James Grauerholz - have a slightly more astringent take on the man and his art, but it mostly stays within the realm of propriety. Of the celebrity guests John Waters provides the most insight, with some choice passages explaining the dyspeptic Burroughs not only as a punk anti-icon for American outsiders, but also a different kind of gay icon than the country had ever (and maybe still has) seen.

Still, it's difficult to imagine that Burroughs, the rare writer whose work can still shock after more than half a century, would have appreciated so many fine and noble sentiments on his behalf. One archival clip shows Ginsberg (always more on the hippie side of things) asking Burroughs, "Do you want to be loved?" His answer? "Not really.
"