FACTOTUM

*** (three stars)

Straight, no chaser.

Running time: 94 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sex). At the Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center.

THE Irish dramatist Brendan Behan described himself as “a drinker with a writing problem.” In the seamy and funny adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s 1975 novel “Factotum,” the author’s alter ego Henry Chinaski (Matt Dillon) struggles with the same addictions: “Even at my lowest times, I can feel the words bubbling inside me.” Like last night’s Jack Daniel’s.

There’s no plot to “Factotum.” Chinaski is just an ornery loser, a jerk of all trades who gets fired from a succession of grim jobs. And movies about writers who live inside a shot glass aren’t rare. But each scene stumbles onto a detail of inspired absurdity or a crunchy bite of dialogue that encapsulates Chinaski’s weird flavor of self-destruction: “I got a job. I can’t wear pants.” Could be a problem.

With his charred voice and his leaden movements, Dillon resists the temptation to give us Drunk Movie antics (singing, thrashing). He doesn’t tumble into gutters or burst into tears. That’s amateur stuff, and this guy is a pro: cool, steady, taciturn and determined.

Even when he pummels a smug little man, he does so with no joy. Delivering ice, Chinaski leaves the contents of his truck melting and ducks into a bar. A guy driving a gold PT Cruiser with a license plate that says “G PEACH” fires him.

After his résumé proves unsuited to the life of a cabbie (“You have 18 drunk-and-disorderly arrests and one for drunk driving”), he finds himself being asked, “Why do you want to work in a pickle factory?” “It reminds me of my grandmother,” he says. “She used to give me pickles.” Ridiculous question, dumb answer. Brilliant.

Chinaski meets a girl (Lili Taylor) on the next bar stool. They don’t exchange cute dialogue or smoldering glances. They just merge like two spills on the bar.

“She gave me her phone number,” Dillon says in voiceover. “Three days later I moved in.” They squint at each other through the cigarette smoke, vomit together, sip their breakfast from the same jug of wine: Nice to see young people getting along.

When they wake up to discover firefighters battling a blaze in thehallway of their building, they

just go back to sleep.

Her only requirement of him is that he remain a loser, an arrangement threatened when he discovers a way to profit from the failure funk in the air: Some guys at the warehouse give him money to wager on the ponies, so he just pockets the cash, figuring correctly that no one in his orbit will ever win anything.

But the splendor of his new suits and good cigars alarms his girlfriend: “You act like you’re a dental student!” she wails.

The word game doesn’t seem any more or less futile than anything else Chinaski does: When things look especially bleak, he applies for a job as a newspaper writer.

He sends his short stories to a magazine that never replies, but there’s no self-pity, no sense that everything would be fine if only the ignorant public would aim a smile or two his way.

Under the surface is the suggestion that writing is just another rotten job, one that forces itself on you with a promise of inconvenient hours and little or no pay.