A long-overdue tribute to a long-lost American literary icon, Algren celebrates the life and work of novelist, short-story writer, and journalist Nelson Algren, whose work plumbed the lower depths of the Chicago underclass in the 1940s and 1950s. Always teetering on the borders of pulp fiction and hard realism, Algren was probably best-known for his novel Man with the Golden Arm, about junkies, petty hustlers, and gamblers in his hometown. Although Algren’s popularity faded over the years, and he eventually had to leave his longtime literary stamping grounds of Chicago, he never stopped writing about American lives on the brink.
This rudimentary but lively documentary film traces Algren’s development as a novelist and his rise and tragic fall in the American literary canon. Although there are the expected literary talking heads that surface here in praise of Algren—Bruce Jay Friedman, Russell Banks, Studs Turkel, and more—the world of rock ‘n’ roll is well represented in the film’s eclectic gallery of commentators. Former Mc5 guitarist Wayne Kramer (who also does the soundtrack here, a mix of electric free jazz and crunchy rock accompaniment) gives his two cents, and a surprisingly eloquent Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) weighs in as well (a Chicagoan himself whose own childhood resembled a down-and-out Nelson Algren short story).
The film follows Algren’s rollercoaster life trajectory. From middle-class beginnings to Depression-era hoboing on the rails to Texas after he graduates journalism school, Algren begins to make a name for himself as a novelist. Once literary success begins to visit Algren in the 1940s, he gains a worldwide reputation, and with it, the spoils. At the pinnacle of his fame, he had a torrid affair with French proto-feminist Simone De Beauvoir, who hooks up with Algren after taking a break from her famous relationship with world-renowned Parisian existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.
The film paints a particularly bittersweet portrait of Algren in his later years: on the one hand, there’s his painful divorce from his beloved Chicago but also a new start in his old age in the supportive literary community of Sag Harbor, Long Island. Algren as a documentary has all the nonfictional fundamentals in place and does a fair job of teasing out the deceptive simplicity of its working-class-hero literary subject, a committed bard of the underclass the likes of whom we may not experience again. Recommended. Aud: C, P.