Though its episodes follow one character through three stages of his life, this adaptation of stories by Charles Bukowski feels stubbornly like three short films stuck together, one of which is a good deal better than the other two.
The lesser episodes are the first, a Fellini-esque tale of a child captivated by a busty redhead at a funfair in 1955, and the third, set in 1975 when the hero has grown into a drunk with necrophile tendencies. The middle section, set in 1962, is a remarkably affecting and unsettling high school freak story in which the main character suffers from a case of acne that makes him more unsettling to look at than the Elephant Man but manages a modest triumph when he turns up at the school prom to impress the object of his affections by mummifying his Frankensteinian features with toilet paper.