Drugstore Cowboy (1989) A Cool and Contemplative Study of Addiction

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant’s second feature, is released as a dual Blu-Ray and UHD by the Criterion Collection this week. A great success on its release back in 1989, the film is widely regarded as reviving the career of Matt Dillon, who takes the lead here as the charismatic, resourceful and somewhat obsessive leader of a drug-thieving crew made up of Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros and Heather Graham. Though set in the early 1970s, Van Sant’s movie, with its independant spirit and its distinctive aesthetic, managed to predict something of the approaching 1990s zeitgeist.

An offbeat drama about the cycle of addiction and petty crime, Drugstore Cowboy continues to establish Van Sant’s interest in marginalized characters and social issues. As Bob Hughes, Dillon leads a nomadic existence alongside his long term girlfriend Dianne (Lynch) and their two naive protégés Rick and Nadine (Le Gros and Graham, looking like dropouts from Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Incorporated) drifting from rented apartments and motel rooms across the Pacific Northwest, always in search of the next fix. Raiding hospital medicine cabinets and breaking into pharmacies keeps sobriety and the straight life at bay for this perverse family unit, but it also places the police firmly on their tails. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Bob knows that the fun or fortune is bound to come to an end sooner or later, but does he have what it takes to call time on it for himself, or will it be left to fate to decide when it’s over?

As with his 1986 debut Mala Noche, based on a semi-autobiographical novella by Portland street writer Walter Curtis, the director once again turned to the written word for inspiration, picking up an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle. Born in Wisconsin in 1936, Fogle was a career criminal who had been known to the law since his teenage years and was residing in prison at the time of Drugstore Cowboy‘s release. Whilst the film’s success ensured that his novel was published in 1990, literary success did not alter Fogle’s life all that much and his subsequent novels and short stories remain unpublished. In 2011 at the age of 74, Fogle was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for robbing a pharmacy in Seattle and he died of mesothelioma in the state of Monroe Correctional Complex one year later.

Initially, Van Sant wanted the musician and actor Tom Waits to play the lead role of Bob Hughes, and that would seem to suggest a more faithful depiction of Fogle’s novel, given that the author would have been thirty-five in 1971, the time that the film is set, and Waits was around forty at the time of the film’s release. However, the financiers vetoed that idea, leaving Van Sant to cast Matt Dillon instead. Dillon had made his name in the early 80s, working for Francis Ford Coppola on the films The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Though he was clearly younger than Van Sant probably envisaged the character – never more apparent than when Bob refers to Rick and Nadine as “TV Babies”, implying that they are a generation brought up on TV and beyond his experiences; in reality Le Gros is two years older than Dillon – the star nevertheless makes this work for the character. Given that the experiences he has had up until this point in his life are a world away from most twenty-six year olds and that he naturally sees himself as a leader whose hard-won wisdom is there for others to follow, there’s something utterly right and quite endearing about how Bob considers himself an old soul. Dillon plays the part beautifully; having honed a cinematic persona of the charismatic, yet somewhat disenfranchised outsider, he delivers not only a career best performance here, one that breaks away from the Brat Pack constraints he had often been saddled with, but his presence also ensured that the film attracted a hip, youthful audience and a strong word of mouth.

Van Sant, who wrote the screenplay alongside Daniel Yost, immerses us into Bob’s world, delivering an introspective and atmospheric movie that compliments the episodic nature of the narrative. Drugstore Cowboy is a suitably loose-form and empathetic study of the lives of its underrepresented, misunderstood protagonists. We’re in the thick of their day to day existence and the overall word of Bob; his and Dianne’s obsessive fear of hexes and their superstitions regarding dogs and leaving hats on the bed, and his reverence for the potency of the pharmaceutical, as evinced by his awe for the stolen vial of Dilaudid, that goes way beyond the “dope fiend” tag he has been given. Overall, the film is elevated by the auteur’s occassional avant-garde artistic sensibilities; the mundanity of everyday America morphs into the zonked out landscapes of their highs as denoted by shots of speeding clouds, cut outs of cows floating in water and bubbles from an aquarium passing over faces. This perspective on reality is complimented by Elliott Goldenthal’s score, which routinely and gradually lurches towards the off-kilter, and by Van Sant’s decision to cast the high priest of counterculture, William S. Borroughs, in the role of Father Tom Murphy, an elderly drug-addicted priest.

Ultimately, where the character of Bob Hughes and his creator, James Fogle, differ is in knowing when to call it a day. When tragedy strikes their ragtag crew, Bob decides to clean his act up. He tells Dianne that he wants to enter the 21-day methadone program and asks her to do it with him, but she refuses and their relationship – a fixture in their lives since high school – collapses. Alone, Bob takes a dead-end job and a crummy apartment, and seeks wisdom from Father Tom, whose cadaverous appearance must surely serve as a warning for him to keep on the right path in a way that his sermonising could arguably – and ironically – never do. The lifelong pursuit of the elusive perfect high, a life on the lam, has come to an end. The hex that Bob had long since feared, has been the very thing to give him pause – a blessing, rather than a curse. Drugstore Cowboy is a cool (in both sense of the word) and contemplative study of addiction which dispenses with the heavy-handed moralising of other films, believing that the material is strong enough to signpost to audiences that there is no glamour, drama or bad guys here, there’s just people who are sick. People that, thanks to Van Sant’s storytelling, you find yourself caring about.

The Criterion release is made up of a new 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by Van Sant and the DoP Robert Yeoman, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack. Extras include an audio commentary with Van Sant and Dillon, new interviews with Yeoman and Kelly Lynch, deleted scenes and a trailer, and an archive featurette exploring the making of the movie, featuring interviews with the key players in the cast and crew, including Burroughs. Completing the set is a booklet essay from author and screenwriter Jon Raymond.

Mark’s Archive – Drugstore Cowboy