Gus Van Sant’s 1989 indie is filled with rich detail and insight into the life of a drug addict, brought to life by a career-defining Matt Dillon performance
“Most people don’t know how they’re going to feel from one minute to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.”
That’s Matt Dillon as Bob Hughes in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy, offering one last revelatory insight via voiceover narration toward the end of the film. Portraits of drug addiction tend to wallow in spiraling miseries, like a hurricane that gathers strength and grows more destructive as it reaches landfall. Movies and television have taught us that drugs are about compulsion, chasing a high that steadily diminishes, and the film acknowledges that, too, with Bob talking about how he and his crew “played a game you couldn’t win”. Yet Drugstore Cowboy ties that compulsion to organization and elaborate bits of drug logic and superstition, which suggests more structure to an addict’s behavior than the ordinary person’s. Staying high means planning for the next hit.