Drugstore Cowboy 4K 1989 Ultra HD 2160p

“...just to escape this life - like having to tie my shoe laces every day!”, says Bob Hughes when asked why he used drugs.
“And how long have you been using?”.
“All my life...”.

Bob will also talk about how hard it is to be a gang leader, the risks pharmacy robbers take, and the fact that “most people don't know how they're going to feel the next minute, and only the addict knows that.”

Almost twenty years ago, then still a budding director Gus Van Sant made a movie that became for many a guiding light of the peculiar “junkie” aesthetic of Generation X.
Based on an unpublished book by James Fogle (the author was in jail at the time), the story of a four-person mini-group involved in drug extraction, somehow managed to incorporate the longing for the '60s, the hopelessness of the '70s, and yet the faith in the future.

The year is 1971, Portland, the flower children are slowly withering in their pots, and only junkies remain from the counter-culture of the past decade. The roads on which the carefree riders rode are deserted. Midnight cowboys have been replaced by drugstore cowboys, which gives the title of the picture an additional ironic meaning. Such is the change of generations.

Escape from the monotony of everyday life is very easy. The heroes run without looking back, from pharmacy to pharmacy, playing hide-and-seek with the police. It's a defensive reaction to the bleak reality around them, the proverbial street romance that stinks of death, only it's harder to stop than it is to start.

Van Sant is not about to teach or instruct anyone. He's an observer and demands the same from the audience. “Drugstore Cowboy” is a hypnotic dive to the bottom, to its inhabitants and troublemakers. The passions that flare up there are always sincere and emotional, and internal drama, doom of “life on the brink” permeate the picture from the first to the last frame.

An artist by training, Van Sant enjoys using elements of his favorite genre in the film - landscape, with silhouettes of various objects floating in the air in the foreground. These shadows of cows, bicyclists, airplanes, slowly spinning against the blue sky, a kind of waking dream, a metaphor for drug intoxication, permeate the picture throughout.

“After the drug entered the vein, a warm wave would rise upward, and a soft explosion would go off in the brain.” And then there would be the “explosion” at the Berlin Film Festival (special prize), the rapture of critics, public acclaim and, already in the 90's, an extraordinary surge of janky themes, when every second film in one way or another copied the style of 'Cowboy'. Adding up all the decades that the picture managed to combine, one can't help but respect its creator. He certainly deserved it.