<em>Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists</em> Feels Like a Eulogy for Journalism

, a new HBO documentary about two of the most celebrated newspapermen of the 20th century, has the passionate, thunderous, and occasionally weepy tone of a good barroom eulogy. Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill represent, various interviewees attest, the last of their kind: journalists writing for and about the working man, self-educated voices for New York’s disenfranchised, reporters who also sometimes managed to be poets. Together, they embody the sharp thrill of a time when to cover the news was to be a hard-drinking, iconoclastic, ink-and-grease-stained truth teller. As Spike Lee puts it in one moment, “These guys were like superstars.” Later, Tom