Metacritic reviews

Leyser has done his job with this, his first feature, burnishing Burroughs' legend and making manifest the enormous shadow he still casts over writers and artists of all stripe.

A well-made but overly idolizing documentary.

Leyser's collation of interviews and stock footage is polished enough to effectively perpetuate the Burroughs legend.

"A Man Within" won't be the last word on Burroughs, who died in 1997, but it's a welcome addition to the biographical canon - less as clear-eyed investigation than for the intimate and moving portrait it paints.

It is all either blood-chilling or hilarious. For those who celebrate Burroughs as one of the darkest and greatest of all comic artists, he is an extreme social satirist of Swiftian stature, whose quasi-pornographic images offer a stark, ghastly/funny photonegative image of the American body politic.

There is a wealth of anecdotal material. Like his subject, Leyser strives to disengage from the conventional, while still being lucid. He succeeds admirably.

Offers a concise summary of Burroughs' life and works. Maybe too concise. At a mere 88 minutes, it feels a bit glancing. But as an introduction or refresher course, it gets the job done.

Contains enough fascinating archival footage to make it worthy of interest.

The author of "Naked Lunch" and his words were funny, freaky and sometimes just Out There. Yet as "there" became "here," Leyser shows, Burroughs seemed to be everywhere.

Reducing an influential genius to a bohemian Zelig with a firearm fetish misses the forest for the flaming metal trees; in Leyser's biographical interzone, the superficial trumps the truly subversive.