Drugstore Cowboy

The operative word in Drugstore Cowboy is "drug". Matt Dillon plays the leader of a group of dopeheads who wander around the country robbing pharmacies to feed their habits. Dillon's chums include doltish James Le Gros and teen-age junkie Heather Graham; also along for the ride is Dillon's wife ...more

Like the best outlaw movies (Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider), director Gus Van Sant's breakthrough sophomore film seeks neither to legitimate the junkie's life nor to moralize against it. The film avoids glib portrayals of its "cowboys" as fun-loving free-spirits; indeed, they're anything but free. Though it paints a corrosive picture of drug abuse, Cowboy also shows the itinerant abusers as real people and not caricatured sociopaths. Van Sant's and Daniel Yost's adaptation of the unpublished ...more