Tales of Ordinary Madness

Charles Serking (Ben Gazzara) is a poet and lecturer who drinks his way through Los Angeles, surfacing only long enough to catch a bus back and fall into more bars and more women. Marco Ferreri, an Italian director shooting in English, builds the film from the stories and the person of Charles Bukowski, including "The Most Beautiful Woman in Town." Underneath the drinking and the sex, it is about a man who cannot stand to be sober enough to feel his own loneliness.