Drugstore Cowboy ***** (1989, Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, Heather Graham, James Remar) – Classic Movie Review 398

The 25-year-old Matt Dillon blazes across the screen in director Gus Van Sant’s powerful, riveting and acutely observed, anti-drugs drama from 1989. It scores strongly with its unusual, thought-proving, intelligently scripted story about a group of four drug-using addicts who survive and finance their habit by robbing drugstores in Oregon in 1971.

Dillon plays ‘Bad’ Bobby Hughes, the superstitious leader of the gang, who decides to leave town after too many brushes with the law and eventually fights to break the drugs habit when one of the gang overdoses. It’s still one of the finest performances of his long career, both naturalistic and convincing as well as charismatic.

He has powerful back-up from a fine cast headed by Kelly Lynch as his wife Diane and James Remar as the boorish cop Gentry, while the author William S Burroughs (one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation) puts in a memorable cameo as a ravaged character called Tom the Priest. Also notable in the cast are James Le Gros as Rick, Heather Graham as Nadine, Max Perlich as David and Grace Zabriskie as ‘Bad’ Bobby’s mom.

Based on James Fogle’s autobiographical novel, with a realistic, incisive screenplay by Van Sant and Daniel Yost, it’s a gruelling and unflinching film, with strong language and drug use. But the clever Van Sant handles the challenging material impeccably.

Ironically, and shockingly, at the time of his death August 23, 2012, at the age of 75, James Fogle was into the fifteenth month of a 15-year, nine-month jail term at the Monroe Correctional Complex in Monroe, Washington, for robbing a pharmacy in Seattle. This was Fogle’s only book.

A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, William Seward Burroughs was one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation. He lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer and died of a heart attack on August 2 1997, aged 83.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 398

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