Quick recap: Bob (played by Matt Dillon) and his crew spend their days getting high and robbing pharmacies. It’s all fun and games until dogs are mentioned and someone puts a hat on a bed.

subtlety is overrated

Fun (?) fact: I couldn’t find much trivia for Drugstore Cowboy, unless you are into knowing which celebrities love this movie. I did learn, however, that a hat on a bed as a sign of bad luck is totally a thing and has been for awhile.

also starring Baby Heather Graham!

My thoughts: Movies about drugs educate me in a way the DARE program did not. I always expected saying no was going to be a bigger deal than it actually ended up being. That’s two years of my life spent on learning how drugs are bad when someone could’ve just shown me the toilet scene in Trainspotting or the arm in Requiem for a Dream and I would’ve been scared straight. And if I’m being completely honest, that Muppet All-Stars special was pretty damn terrifying as well.

I’d never want to disappoint ALF

Until Drugstore Cowboy, I never realized how much work was involved to stay high. That was literally all Bob and his crew did: rob pharmacies and get high. And sometimes they got high in order to rob more pharmacies. At one point in the film, detectives get wise as to their illegal operations and so the crew sets out on a cross country trip in order to-you guessed it- get high and rob more pharmacies. But they couldn’t just stash their….stash, so they bagged it up and sent it ahead of them so that there would always be plenty of drugs when they needed them. Director Gus Van Sant never makes a morality call about the crew’s life choices and instead leaves the audience to draw their own conclusion. Once Bob decides to get clean and get a real job, it’s not clear whether his life has improved. The same can be said for his former crew. I appreciated this perspective because I could focus on the characters rather than whether or not doing drugs was a good idea or not.

That being said, for no reason in particular, I just didn’t really like Drugstore Cowboy. The music was good, acting was good, the storyline moved at a reasonable pace, but I never really got into it and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. At times it felt like van Sant was trying too hard to get into the indie market with his film, but that’s also just who he is as a director. I wish I had better reasoning as to why this film rubbed me the wrong way, but sometimes that just happens.

Final review: 2/5

Up next: Umberto G