Drugstore Cowboy

Starring:Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James LeGros, Heather Graham, Eric Hull, Max Perlich, James Remar, John Kelly (II), Grace Zabriskie, George Catalano, Janet Baumhover, Ted D'Arms, Neal Thomas, Stephen Rutledge, Beah Richards, William S. Burroughs, Robert Lee Pitchlynn, Roger Hancock, Michael Parker, Ray Monge
Director: Gus Van Sant
Studio: Lions Gate
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com essential video

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 capsule--except 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. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews:

Never put a hat on the bed.......2007-04-12

Bob (Matt Dillon) has a perfect druggie's life. He and his wife Dianne (Kelly Lynch) and close friend Rick (James LeGros) have a perfectly working scheme to rob pharmacies for prescription drugs. Rick has recently taken new girlfriend Nadine (a young Heather Graham) into the fold.

But the cops, especially Gentry (James Remar), are onto Bob and his little operation. Bob and his crew must be very careful. After a raid to their home, they are forced to move to an apartment complex where Bob performs a reverse sting on the police.

Aside from the "stress and strain of staying high", Bob has to deal with his intense superstitions such as not mentioning dogs, not looking at the back of a mirror, and NEVER putting a hat on the bed. If a superstition is broken, bad luck comes to all.

'Drugstore Cowboy', in all honesty, turned me off because of the word "cowboy" in the title, but believe me this is a total addiction/drug movie and has nothing to do with cowboys or westerns at all. Set in 1971, the props (cars, record players, fashions, soundtrack) are all true to form. Topping the chart on interest is the appearance of the one and only William S. Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch and Junky) as a former priest named Tom with a bad habit.

There are a few very graphic needle scenes but otherwise no overt violence, and the actors (especially Max Perlich as David) did great jobs of "tweaking". The problems start when Bob is effected by the death of one of his gang, and decides to go home and go straight on a methadone program, explaining the problems of a junkie to his caseworker as "The pressures of everyday life, like having to tie your shoes."

My only problem with the DVD was that there were no subtitles for either English hearing impaired or any other languages. If your hearing impaired, you'll have to turn the volume WAY up. Still, this is a drug addiction movie you won't want to miss. The acting is incredible, the characters fully fleshed and completely believable, and the scripting tight and true. Definitely a worthwhile addition to your addiction collection. Enjoy!

A Futile Game Where The Players Are Destined To Lose........2006-11-28

This is an excellent movie which has a semi documentary feel about it. It is about a group of drug addicts led by Matt Dillon who rob pharmacies (drugstores) in the hope of scoring some drugs and getting high. Matt Dillon's character is smart enogh to realize "this is a game we were destined to lose". It is only until one of his group overdoses and dies that he realizes what a wasted and futile existence he is leading so he gets clean. However his past comes back to haunt him with a vengeance. This movie is a cut about the "lowlife junkie trying to score " movies but I must warn you that the depiction of drug taking scenes is not for the sqeamish. Great performances all around and a special mention for the junkie Priest.

Drugstore Cowboy: Just What The Doctor Ordered!.......2006-11-12

"I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend. Yeah me! - Bob! The sweet mother's son." And so it begins where it ends and ends where it begins. Directed by Gus Van Sant, _Drugstore Cowboy_ is a totally unique film with a totally unique cast:

Bob .... Matt Dillon
Dianne .... Kelly Lynch
Rick .... James Le Gros
Nadine .... Heather Graham
David .... Max Perlich

Bob and his crew all have full-time jobs - robbing drugstores. There are valuable lessons to be learned here. For example, don't trade no uptown crank for no downtown trash. This story takes place in the Pacific Northwest during the early 1970s and it has a great soundtrack.

Bob and Dianne in a tender bedroom scene: "Dianne, what've you gone crazy or somethin'? Dianne, what the f_ck are you doin'? What are you on glue or somethin'?"

Another touching scene comes when Bob's mom finds him and Dianne at her door: "Oh Lord, it's my dope fiend thief of a son and his crazy little nymphomaniac wife. Please tell me what I did to deserve this. Never knowing when there's going to be a knock on my door telling me my baby's dead, green with an overdose. Shot by a mad pharmacist or run over by a car while fleeing from police pursuit. Why me?"

A series of misadventures (some of them very funny) lead Bob to the conclusion that there must be more to life than just staying high. One day, Bob decides to go straight, but his wife can't even imagine a life without drugs.

Bob speaking to the Methadone lady: "I'm a junkie. I like drugs. I like the whole lifestyle. But it just didn't pay off." Officer Gentry, who has busted Bob on several occasions and harassed him up until now, has his doubts when Bob enters rehab. But, Gentry, expertly played by James Remar, finally becomes a believer and a bond develops between him an Bob as the weeks pass.

Ghosts from Bob's past creep back into his life, yet he is able to resist all temptations. One night, a visit from David changes everything. And here we are, back at the beginning. "I was once a shameless, full-time dope fiend. Yeah me! - Bob! The sweet mother's son." It's not what you might think. Bob is not back on drugs. There is another development which is far more pressing.

This is a well done movie with a great script. The 1.85:1 anamorphic video is crisp and clean. The disk has a 28 minute making-of documentary and a fascinating running commentary with director Gus Van Sant and Matt Dillon.

Be careful, "The Israelites" as performed by Desmond Dekker & The Aces is habit forming. This is the background music for the closing credits and I have found myself playing it over and over again.

An intense film, the peak of the director's career........2006-08-09

Gus Van Sant had one and only one talent: he could pick the right people to act in his films. In Drugstore Cowboy, all the actors fit their roles perfectly. Matt Dillon is ideal for the role of Bob, the main character. Even though he's a junkie and thief, he becomes a halfway sympathetic character through a kind of con-man charm and a willingness to accept the consequences of his actions. At the very least, he knows what he is. He has no delusions about himself. This puts him above someone like the pathetic junkie Dave, who grovels before Bob when he thinks he can get drugs out of it, and then fancies himself to be a tough guy when he gets his hands on a gun.

When Bob decides to give up drugs, Dillon doesn't overplay the decision. It's not like Bob suddenly decided that his lifestyle was morally wrong and had a momentous change of heart. Someone like him probably wouldn't put much stock in such arguments. His decision to clean up is prompted only by exhaustion. Basically, he just becomes tired of going nowhere, and realizes that his lifestyle will lead him to a very miserable end if he doesn't change it. His speech to the social worker contains a kind of weary cynicism.

But although Bob gave up on morality long ago, he's ultimately a normal person. He discovers this only after he cleans up, somewhat to his own surprise, because he still thinks and acts pretty much the same way as before. Thus, he never condemns other junkies, and in fact continues to sympathize with them. It's just that without the drugs weighing on him, he doesn't need to dig himself in deeper anymore.

The other characters are less important to the film, but they are also played very well. The young junkie who starts out in Bob's group and later takes command of it has maybe three lines in the whole film, but just his face says everything one needs to know about him. Van Sant was an admirer of "Tulsa," the 1973 book of photography by Larry Clark that depicted the lives of various drug addicts, and that influence is evident here. For this role, he found some guy who looks exactly like David Roper at thirty. Probably "Tulsa" also supplied the idea for the scene where the junkies wave their guns around. They don't generally commit murder or armed robbery. The guns are mostly needed to show off.

Even the cop, who has a very minor role in the film, stands out by the end. He goes after Bob because it's his job and his conviction to do so. In the process, he has no great respect for the law either. He just views Bob as a punk who poses a threat to society and should be eliminated by any means. But when he realizes that Bob has actually given up drugs, he becomes sympathetic and genuinely tries to help.

And the famous Beat writer William Burroughs is the most perfectly cast of all. He portrays an old morphine addict with an aristocratic streak. It is impossible to imagine a role that would be better suited to Burroughs, or to imagine another actor who would be better suited to this role. This is exactly how he is described in Jack Kerouac's books. The old man has absolutely no regrets about the way he has lived his life, and in fact has come to view himself as being superior to others - more educated, more refined, more honest - because of his drug habit. If you buy the idea that the purpose of art is to accurately capture some aspect of reality, then this is art, of an unsettling sort.

And that's all. The film is carried by the actors. Van Sant contributes nothing much in the way of cinematography or screenwriting. Actually, his sole visual gimmick is to show the junkies floating in the clouds and gazing at flying cows when they're high. This just looks silly. In my opinion, the same point would have been made better if he just showed them lolling around slack-jawed on their couches.

The script is likewise nothing special. In fact, sometimes it feels like there's barely a script at all. The four junkies only have one protracted conversation, where Bob describes some superstitions that are apparently supposed to be common among thieves. But that conversation is again carried by Dillon's acting, not by the actual content of his lines. In some sense, this film doesn't really need a script. The characters are contained entirely in the faces of the actors. In any case, they're supposed to be pretty ordinary people who have very boring, tedious lives when they're not out stealing. They're not meant to pause and reflect much. If the film had a lot of dialogue, it would probably have seemed much more artificial.

And, well, that's pretty much it. When this film came out, Van Sant was supposed to be the next saviour of American independent cinema. His next film was My Own Private Idaho, which also features excellent casting, but has much more clunky symbolism and a tendency to pretentiously quote Shakespeare. After that, Van Sant's ambition ran wild. He remade Hitchcock's Psycho, filmed a movie about two guys getting lost in a desert, won the grand prize at Cannes for a graphic depiction of a school shooting, and did other pointless things. But Drugstore Cowboy is a good film.

real, hilarious, and absolutely crazy..........2006-05-15

The story of Bob and his drugstore raids through various cities is a very real story. This movie, however- doesn't so much offer into the insights of what it is like when you get drugged up or high. This is a movie about the lifestyle Bob and Diane lead- the drugstores they raided, the scores they made, the encounters they had along the way, and what eventually led to Bob going to rehab in the very end.

About ? of the movie is focused on Bobs "recovery" or attempts to get his life back on track. He goes and gets a job, he goes to the methadone program, he completely gives up on his relationship with Diane... he makes a commitment to be completely drug free- and in the end it is tragic what happens.

Go see this movie! There has never been one like it before; it is interesting to watch the lifestyle these people live.

{10 Movie Set} the Gunrunner / Meet Dr. Christian / Remedy for Riches / Intimate Agony / Panic in Echo Park / Melody for Three / Dr. Kildare's Strange Case / Anatomy of an Illness / Boy in the Plastic Bubble / Stigma

Average customer rating:

{10 Movie Set} the Gunrunner / Meet Dr. Christian / Remedy for Riches / Intimate Agony / Panic in Echo Park / Melody for Three / Dr. Kildare's Strange Case / Anatomy of an Illness / Boy in the Plastic Bubble / Stigma

ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Digitally Remastered For Superior Picture Quality
Dolby Digital 5.1 Sound
Chapter Stops
scene selections
interactive menus

ASIN: B000H6YAM6

Average customer rating:

Never put a hat on the bed
A Futile Game Where The Players Are Destined To Lose.
Drugstore Cowboy: Just What The Doctor Ordered!
An intense film, the peak of the director's career.
real, hilarious, and absolutely crazy...

Drugstore Cowboy [Region 2]
Starring: Matt Dillon , Kelly Lynch , James LeGros , Heather Graham , and Eric Hull
Director: Gus Van Sant
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video