In the 1980s, during the cocaine epidemic, there was a treatment center boom and a rapid increase of membership in addiction recovery groups. At the very end of that decade, a rising new talent, Gus Van Sant, made a brilliant film that defied the usual approach to how addicts are portrayed: from 1989, it’s Drug Store Cowboy.
Matt Dillon plays Bob Hughes, a drug dealer and junkie in his 20s driving an old Cadillac sedan around the Portland Oregon area robbing drugstores with a small crew, consisting of his wife Dianne, played by Kelly Lynch, his friend Rick (James LeGros) and a more recent member, Rick’s teenage girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham). They do after hours break-ins when that’s feasible, which land the biggest hauls. Other than that, Bob’s favorite method is to create a distraction: for example, Nadine fakes an epileptic seizure in front of a drugstore, which allows Bob to slip into the back and grab as many opioid medications as he can find. Well, drug store security has dramatically improved since then, needless to say.
Matt Dillon was an inspired casting choice for the lead. It’s arguably his best work. He narrates the story with a mix of flippant sarcasm, dark humor, and a bit of savage truth. “Most people don’t know how they’re gonna feel from one moment to the next,” he says at one point. “But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.”
Daniel Yost, a friend of Van Sant’s, brought to his attention an unpublished manuscript of this title by another friend, an addict named James Fogle, who was serving a prison sentence in Washington State. With Fogle’s permission, Van Sant and Yost fashioned the film’s whip-smart screenplay. The interest here is not in the robberies, which take up very little screen time, but the life of these four people in between the crimes, hanging out in seedy motels, getting loaded, dealing, and planning for the next job.
The details are what makes this great. There’s Bob’s weird relationship with Dianne, which after years of addiction, doesn’t appear to involve sex anymore. Lynch is great as this hard cunning woman who supports Bob without neglecting to look out for herself. Then there’s all the paranoia and superstition. Bob is adamant that no one should ever place a hat on a bed, because it will put a curse on them. As the film progresses, the paranoid element is more heightened, and of course, as they say, paranoids also have real enemies.
There’s a reckless attitude towards the police. One extended sequence involves a hilarious and dangerous prank they pull on a detective investigating them. In a later tour de force, they discover that the motel they’re currently staying in is hosting a sheriff’s convention. They need to get out of there right away without attracting any notice.
Despite what some might think, this inside view of things is not meant to glamorize the subject. You don’t want to live like these people. Bob knows that it’s a losing game overall, and in the poignant last section of the movie, he attempts to go straight. In the end, Bob realizes there is a much rougher generation of addicts ready to replace him that he calls “the TV babies.”
Drugstore Cowboy is the real deal: a funny, sad, edgy film evoking the inner world of wasted lives.
