‘Truth is stranger than fiction” might well sum up the life of William S. Burroughs, who, along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, gave birth to the Beat generation in the ’40s.
Burroughs’ long and rebellious life is detailed in the documentary “William S. Burroughs: A Man Within,” directed by 25-year-old Yony Leyser.
Not even Burroughs, high on whatever drug had control of him at the time, could have made up a life as rebellious, creative and strange as his own.
He was a Harvard-educated druggie from a solidly middle-class family who accidentally killed his wife while trying to shoot a gin glass off her head.
He abandoned his only son; obsessed over guns, male hustlers and cats; and wrote the subversive classics “Naked Lunch,” “Queer” and “Junkie.”
The film includes previously unseen home movies and VHS tapes donated by those who knew Burroughs, who died in 1997 at the age of 83.
There is rare footage of Burroughs and Ginsberg together (they hold hands at one point), shots of Burroughs reading from his books and dining with Andy Warhol, and an impressive array of talking heads.
They include John Waters (who suggests that Burroughs “was famous for all the things you were supposed to hide” and calls him “a religious figure”), Patti Smith (who says she often daydreamed of marrying the bisexual writer), Amiri Baraka, Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant and David Cronenberg.
Another — Peter Weller, who portays Burroughs in Cronenberg’s 1991 “Naked Lunch” — also serves as narrator.
The home movies of Burroughs in his final years, which he spent in Lawrence, Kan., show a frail, hunched-over gentleman with a cane — a poignant ending to Leyser’s reverential and entertaining film.