Drugstore Cowboy

A film set in Portland in the early 1970s. Bob leads a group of four. His wife Dianne, a younger man and a younger woman make up the rest, and they rob chemists' shops for drugs. The method is worked out. One person makes a scene, another goes behind the counter, and they are gone before anyone works out what has happened. They are not glamorous. They live in cheap rooms, drive between towns and are broke between jobs. Bob is superstitious. Nobody may put a hat on a bed, and dogs and certain words are bad luck; the film takes this seriously because he does. Then something goes wrong and Bob decides to stop. From there the film becomes about the attempt. A clinic, a job, a rented room and the old friends who keep coming to the door. What the narrative is interested in is not the high but the routine: the film shows addiction as work, with planning, travel and boredom, and refuses both the warning and the celebration. The narration is Bob's and is dry, unhurried and often funny. A priest appears late in the film, a defrocked addict who speaks about the culture around drugs. He is played by William S. Burroughs, the writer, and he wrote his own lines. Matt Dillon plays Bob, Kelly Lynch plays Dianne, and Heather Graham and James Le Gros are the younger two. The source is a novel by James Fogle, unpublished at the time and written while he was serving a prison sentence for the same kind of crime. Gus Van Sant directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes American independent cinema of the late 1980s and honest films about drugs. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a moral; the film gives none and does not condemn its characters.