Blu-ray: Drugstore Cowboy

Rehab people will tell you there are three stages to drug abuse: fun; fun with problems; problems. There’s also a fourth phase, where there aren't any problems, because you’re dead.

Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy maps out the territory between stages two and four. Bob (Matt Dillon) and his girlfriend Dianne (Kelly Lynch) lead Rick (James LeGros) and his girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham) in a gang of chronic narcotics addicts robbing pharmacies around around Portland, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest in order to stay one step ahead of withdrawal. 

Timewise, the film is hard to pin down. Set in the 1970s, it was released in October 1989, yet it feels more simpatico with the zeitgeist of the 1990s – more aligned with that decade’s blooming of independent cinema. Inasmuch as it relates to the '80s at all, it recoils from the spirit of those dreadful years: Nancy Reagan said "Just Say No"; the film's characters – pace Depeche Mode – "Just Can’t Get Enough".

When did the '80s end and the '90s begin anyway? Decades, as we experience them, don’t begin and end in strict synchronisation with their year zeroes. In this case, geography and economics play a major role, too. In his fascinating essay for this Criterion release, Jon Raymond, novelist and co-writer of Kelly Reichardt's screenplays, describes late '80s Portland as “a cultural tundra, a good place to shoot a movie set in 1971 because the Seventies had never ended here.”

Time is an elusive enough phenomenon even before you add hard drugs to the mix. The artist formerly known as Prince dubbed time “just an agreed-upon construct”. The physicist John Archibald Wheeler popularised the notion that time “is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once” – an insight that he admitted he’d cribbed from graffiti in an Austin, Texas men's room. The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.

Dillon’s Bob would be hip to all this. Among his many fervently held superstitions are dogs, hats on beds, and the backs of mirrors: “It’ll affect your future because you’re looking at yourself backwards”. William Burroughs, who appears here as a defrocked priest, forlornly adhering to a methadone regime – “though sometimes I get a little ahead of my schedule, you understand?” – used to talk in terms of "junk time": a sick junkie "has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.”

Bob’s gang do a lot of waiting. As Burroughs’s friend and fellow heroin enthusiast Lou Reed used to warn the faithful: “First thing you learn is that you always have to wait”. Burroughs and the Beats hover over Bob’s gang like benevolent ghosts; it’s yet another anachronistic aspect.

Yet these aren’t hippies. They’re drug connoisseurs, not omnivores, the narcotic equivalent of Paul Giamatti's oenophile in Alexander Payne’s Sideways: Demerol is their disdained Cab Franc, the potent synthetic opiate Dilaudid their esteemed Pinot.

Van Sant points out on this disc’s excellent commentary track that none of these people wear jeans and t-shirts. Bob plays golf, and is proud of his Ben Hogan clubs; he and his nemesis, Detective Gentry (James Remar), taunt each other about their respective handicaps.

But they’re definitely outsiders – “beautiful losers” as Raymond has it, channeling Leonard Cohen – and like all outsiders they both suffer for and benefit from their outsiderdom. They’re happy on the margins, and don’t aspire to be any other way than high. Dianne can’t stimulate Bob’s interest in sex, and that’s not the only echo of Bonnie and Clyde (1967); the parallel is underscored by the prominent use of Desmond Dekker’s '60s anthem ‘The Israelites’.

The music is very well integrated. The soundtrack, script, cinematography, direction, editing, locations, production design, colour schemes, and costumes – all discussed on the commentary track – click together like cogs in a machine. Everything about this film just works.

Simultaneously realist and impressionistic, its sequences and themes accrete and blend like splodges of paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas. Anybody who has even peripheral experience of this sort of milieu will instantly recognise how true it rings. It’s a stylish (but not stylized), great-looking film, and the transfer is exquisite: crisp but with satisfying film grain. The disc includes revealing interviews with Lynch and cinematographer Robert Yeoman.

The acting is phenomenal, across the board. This was the first role the teenager Graham got to choose for herself: as Raymond says, she’s “amazingly self-possessed”. Dillon has never been better; he’s like a young Jack Nicholson. Lynch is a revelation; again, Raymond captures it perfectly: “defensive hauteur and subtle splashes of vulnerability”. Le Gros gives a masterclass in less-is-more. Max Perlich convinces as a jittery weasel: the worm who turns. James Remar emits an antagonistic empathy. (Pictured below: Kelly Lynch and Matt Dillon)
Interestingly, throughout the various extras on this generous Blu-ray package, opinions vary on whether this can be considered “an anti-drug film”. It’s certainly no advert for the junkie lifestyle. But there's no moralising. Lynch calls it “a slice of life”, and that feels fair. The blissed-out “everything’s copacetic” benefits of being high are limned sparingly: Bob languidly notes “the ants in the grass are just doing their thing”, and there are oneiric montages where houses, trees, bicycles, hypodermics, and animals float around the screen, like The Wizard of Oz if Dorothy had been into Dilaudid. But there’s also a lot of paranoia, ennui, and desperation, with tragedy forever lurking just one syringe plunger push away.

It’s a dark story, but not without humour, or heart. In fact it’s a beautiful, poetic, humanist film. It begins and ends with Bob in an ambulance, on his way to hospital (“the fattest pharmacy in town”), dreamily philosophising whilst seemingly spiraling towards being declared DOA. Lying on a gurney, but looking at the stars.

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