Those who know David Wojnarowicz's art may have trouble finding their bearings in Postcards From America, the film "inspired" by his autobiographical writings. English director-writer Steve McLean's debut feature is a quasi-road movie about a character who looks like Wojnarowicz. (The adult Wojnarowicz is played by Jim Lyons who even mimics Woznarowicz's gawky, shoulders-forward gait.) But this character is neither an artist, nor--after the first five minutes, it seems--HIV-infected. So what did McLean glean from the Wojnarowicz essays collected in Close to the Knives and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline? The inspiration for an over-determined, cliché-ridden narrative about a boy abused by his brutish dad (a hunk on screen, of course), who runs away to become a Times Square hustler.

Who was the real David Wojnarowicz? The product of a violent home, but far more important, a gifted and inspiring artist who moved from the East Village of the eighties to global renown. As HIV decimated his community, David's work grew increasingly passionate and political. He excoriated homophobes and governmental apparatchiks indifferent to the suffering of people with AIDS. He produced not just photo-montages and paintings, but searing and often poignant texts that sometimes appeared in his paintings and prints. In 1989, he became well known in the U.S. as the catalogue essayist for the federally-funded Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing show at Artists Space in New York, which drew the wrath of John Frohnmayer, the then-new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Wojnarowicz remained in the media spotlight due to several court battles with Donald (American Family Association) Wildmon. The gonzo-reverend reproduced tiny porno-still details from the artist's "Sex Series" on AFA brochures and implied that these appropriations were the entire artworks. "I'm sure he's making plenty of money," Wojnarowicz characteristically commented to me.

Who is the David Wojnarowicz portrayed in Postcards From America? A drifter and a grifter; the blank and passive slate onto which horrific experiences are inscribed. We see him abused and nearly shot by his drunken father. We see him terrorized by a teenage thug who demands that Wojnarowicz sexually service him. We see him cruising for a bruising, which is supplied by a sadistic trucker who picks up our hitchhiking protagonist. Cause and effect are implied via a psychology as crude as it is sentimental: Where else, for instance, does he find real comraderie and support, but from the circle of hustler-buddies and johns who befriend him? The screen David says about a married john. "I grew to love him, he gave me back some sense of self worth,"

Unfortunately, even most of these utterances are not spoken, but heard in voice-over: The movie's child, teen, and adult Davids barely speak. This is only one of the problems arising from McLean's shockingly uncinematic modus operandi. Others include a (barely) dramatized narrative fragmented into vignettes that carom back and forth in time. This time-travelling doesn't pay off. The film's single, compelling scene portrays David and a hustler pal menacing a pick-up with meat cleavers they'd just shoplifted from Macy's. Unlike most of the film, it vibrates with conflict and energy. Even the desert location of the film's opening and closing seems pointless. This vision of a hitchhiking David constantly assaulted by gun-toting wackos seems to have less to do with Wojnarowicz's dryly absurdist sensibility than a clichéd view of American life On the Road seasoned with a dash of Easy Rider-style paranoia.

The most galling aspect of the film is the incomprehensible decision to simply jettison Wojnarowicz's identity as a visual artist. The argument that this is not a biography but merely a meditation on Wojnarowicz's writing doesn't hold up: If so, why bother simulating the artist's appearance? And why incorporate--and obfuscate--the seminal moment in his art and life? This came in the form of the death of his photographer-lover-mentor Peter Hujar, which is represented in the film as nothing more than a frustrating encounter with a prickly, unidentified person with AIDS. But Wojnarowicz's life was infinitely more compelling than this film's bland fictions. Moments after Hujar died, Wojnarowicz photographed him, temporarily sublimating his grief and fury in his photographic recording; a simultaneous betrayal, psychologically-freighted photo-assault, and tribute. The resulting pictures of a gaunt, slack-jawed Hujar became the basis of some of Wojnarowicz's most affecting canvases.