In recent years, it has been well understood that a Calderón-Zygmund operator T is pointwise controlled by a finite number of dyadic operators of a very simple structure (called the sparse operators). We obtain a similar pointwise estimate for the commutator [b, T ] with a locally integrable function b. This result is applied into two directions. If b ∈ BM O, we improve several weighted weak type bounds for [b, T ]. If b belongs to the weighted BM O, we obtain a quantitative form of the two-weighted bound for [b, T ] due to Bloom-Holmes-Lacey-Wick.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 42B20, 42B25.