Factotum

Norwegian director Brent Hamer ("Kitchen Stories") is the latest in a long line of European filmmakers to cross the pond and go looking for Charles Bukowski's America. He finds it in "Factotum," an adaptation of Bukowski's second novel (and a couple of short stories), with Matt Dillon as Bukowski alter-ego Henry Chinaski — itinerant day laborer, resolute writer and full-time drinker — and Minneapolis/St. Paul as the anonymous American city.

Dillon, who narrates with a bemused matter-of-factness, has insouciant disaffection down cold. Neither superior nor indifferent, he's simply focused on maintaining his idiosyncratic integrity as he shuffles from one brain-dead job and/or convenient bed to the next. He leaves both the minute he starts to feel dammed up or, worse, stagnant, usually getting as far as the nearest bar.

Lili Taylor provides a little extra indie cred, looking appropriately banged around as a feisty drinking buddy and tempestuous lover, and Marisa Tomei plays the socially elevated barfly who adopts the street poet for a few weeks or a few months (time is somewhat vague).

There's not much story to speak of — Bukowski's work doesn't necessarily lend itself to the feature-length form, at least in terms of traditional storytelling — merely a series of events. Hamer observes with a dry deadpan that he tends to puncture when he pushes for a laugh from the wry humor, and his outsider's eye gives the city an unreal quality, like a foreign stand-in for the real thing.

That view from abroad gives this askew look at a life of drift and impermanence a subdued, modest grace. He refuses to turn Chinaski into some kind of hero rebel but allows a rumpled dignity to emerge from the punctured machismo and shrugging candor.

"Factotum" is rated R for language and sexual content. Running time: 94 minutes.