Gus Van Sant made his name with this offbeat story
of a small group of drug addicts who heist
pharmacies to feed their habit. Matt Dillon
completely broke with his juvenile persona as Bob,
the grungy ringleader and jittery mastermind of a
junkie crew. With his frustrated wife Dianne
(Kelly Lynch), his loyal partner, the easygoing
Rick (James Le Gros), and Rick's juvenile
girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham in an early
role), Bob plots ingenious heists and spends the
rest of his days sitting around the house getting
high. When the heat becomes too intense in
Portland, the quartet hits the road for small-town
drug stores and hospitals, but when their luck
runs out it does so in grand fashion. Set in the
Pacific Northwest of 1971, Van Sant so
effortlessly re-creates the period that you'd
think the film was a time capsuleexcept for the
attitude. Van Sant refuses to moralize and lines
his sympathies behind his characters. They're no
heroes, but Van Sant can't cast them as villains
either. His low-key direction concentrates on the
flavor of day-to-day life for a crew of junkies
living from fix to fix. Even his drug imagery is
inventively placid, a dreamy set of floating
visions that suggests their own disembodied
states. James Remar costars as the dogged police
detective Gentry and cult author William S.
Burroughs makes a memorable appearance as the
aging junkie Tom the Priest.
| Format size: | Widescreen |
| Languages: | English |
| Country: | CAN |
| Runtime: | 104 min. |
| Number of discs: | 1 |
