A man staggers drunkenly out of a bar . . . through the window, collapsing in broken glass: so begins Majewski's atypical biopic of the cult poet and provocateur Rafal Wojaczek, who burned brightly through the grays of Communist-era Poland before killing himself in 1971, aged twenty-six. This is no usual hagiography of a great man; Majewski presents the poet as drunk and disorderly at all times, with only a few scenes devoted to our hero actually writing. Like Gus Van Sant's Last Days, a similar portrait of a doomed artist, Wojaczek gives no time to presenting the backstory of why the protagonist wants, or needs, to die; here only the drive, and the will, remain. Shot in austere black-and-white, wired with a humor that's been compared to Jarmusch and Kaurismäki (see Wojaczek's sound-off with a blindingly tuxedoed house-band named “The Secret”), Wojaczek presents a Polish life that's more Bukowski and Rimbaud than Iron Curtain.