A documentary by David Vaisbord. Unrated. Plays Friday and Saturday, April 15 and 16, at Pacific Cinémathíƒ ¨que

How do you present an artist's vision? In the case of John Maybury's Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, re-creating the dread-drenched nightmare world of its subject, Francis Bacon, made a kind of convenient sense; once you got used to seeing everything through a red-meat filter, the painter's POV didn't seem quite so extreme.

Attila Richard Lukacs has spent his time with slabs o' beef, and-on canvas, anyway-his mostly male universe is in thrall to images of muscle and blood. But David Vaisbord's taut portrait, Drawing Out the Demons: A Film About the Artist Attila Richard Lukacs, is a documentary that lets Lukacs tell a story with words and actions, not celluloid paint. Without his makeup, so to speak, the artist comes across as someone profoundly uncomfortable with everything but the act of creation. Over the course of roughly five years, he is seen whining, yelling, smoking (always smoking), and also laughing his way through various addictions, tight squeezes, and geographic changes.

T he film starts in the summer of 2001 in pre-9/11 New York, where Lukacs has just finished making his last stand in his assault on Manhattan's hard-to-penetrate art world. The Alberta-born painter had already killed in his previous haunts of Vancouver and Berlin, but his failure to be embraced by the U.S. elite was obviously painful. This is seen in his leave-taking, which consists of some pretty disorganized packing and much railing against even the people who are there to help him, including his parents. "Ricky's" long-time art dealer, now ex-patron and former friend, the Swiss-based Patrik Schedler, points out that there's "a positive and negative side" to the painter's unusually tight relationship with his Hungarian mom and dad-which mostly involves them paying for everything while he goes off on self-destructive binges.

Finally, Lukacs is seen pulling out of his tailspin, first in a health- restoring sojourn to Hawaii, in which he appears to grow 10 years younger, then in a less ostentatious return to Vancouver.

"He always seems to land with his bum in the butter," declares fellow '80s survivor Angela Grossman, with only the tiniest hint of envy in her voice. The artist must not have seen his buns as being quite so creamy at times, but the important message you get from Vaisbord's film is that we'll get to keep seeing what Attila sees for some time to come.