“The powerful documentary, Algren, shines a much needed light on Nelson Algren. By highlighting his words as much as his deeds, director Michael Caplan raises Algren up to stand, again, by his contemporaries from mid-century American literature.
Algren inspires and transfixes viewers to become readers of Algren, admirers of Algren, followers of Algren — which translates to gold far beyond pulp.”
– Martha K Baker—Alliance of Women Film Journalists
“The ignored and unsung, the “side-street solitary” were his subjects, and the story of this somewhat forgotten writer is told with immediacy and engagement in Michael Caplan’s Algren, a documentary that fuses the writer and his city in a cosmology of grinding toil and unexpected beauty.”
– Barlo Perry—Paris/LA
“Caplan…has produced an extraordinary portrait of a major author who has fallen into the realm of the forgotten despite his many successes. Caplan will often use a backdrop of Algren’s written words with typeset snippets of passages from his articles, books, and essays to illustrate a point…The frequent use of Algren’s own writing as a physical background should make you run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore or library to read more.”
–Neeley Swanson—Easy Reader News
“…I was transfixed by Algren’s story. Algren is a compelling documentary about a literary genius who became a voice for America’s disenfranchised.”
– Quelle Movies
“Caplan’s shining moments as a documentarian are the inclusion of sound bites of Algren reading from and discussing his prose, and footage of him in his later years being interviewed by an ambitious but green journalist who is unable to get straight answers to some personal questions.”
– Ed Symkus—Arts Fuse
“A reverent ode to an irreverent writer, Algren offers an in-depth, kaleidoscopic view into the life and career of one of America’s most underrated writers who championed the Chicago lower-class…Algren is a love letter to the writer who identified with those that society deemed unimportant, who gave dignity and voice to those that America overlooked.”
– Austin Jenkins–Tallahassee Democrat
“I loved the documentary most when it sensorily saturated the viewer the way Algren’s writing does…Using photographs, archival audio, and interviews …Caplan creates an 85-minute pastiche of Algren’s life, inspired as much by Algren’s books as by the funny, odd, private collages the writer made for and stuck to his apartment walls for years.”
– Katie Prout—Chicago Reader
“This long overdue comprehensive documentary on writer Nelson Algren gets into the weeds of his amazing life as an outlier and chronicler of the dispossessed…”
– Patrick McDonald—HollywoodChicago.com
“A long-overdue tribute to a long-lost American literary icon…a committed bard of the underclass the likes of whom we may not experience again.”
– Michael Sandlin—Video Librarian
“The toughest of the tough-guy writers was Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side and subject of the wondrous new documentary ‘Algren.'”
– Kelly Vance–East Bay Express
“Michael Caplan’s documentary about Nelson Algren is a love letter to the gritty Chicago of the past as well as an homage to Algren, perhaps America’s most under-appreciated author.”
– Nancy Bishop—Third Coast Review
“Algren belonged to a generation of hard-drinking, brawling writers that’s long since gone extinct…In training his focus on those most preferred not to think about, Algren found a bruised nobility in the down-but-not-out subjects who considered him one of their own and became a national name for it.”
– Charles Bramesco—The Guardian
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