Drugstore Cowboy 4K 1989

It's just a game. The decades-old game of cowboys and sheriffs that American boys love so much, and Bob and his friends are no exception. Cowboys are traveling around the country and enjoying their lives, robbing towns and getting on the nerves of the local sheriff. The sheriff and his deputies are looking for any opportunity to catch them. There are also loser sixes, who try their best to pass for their own, but they will never become them - the guts. Girls are accepted into the game, but on a very large blat and only for minor roles. True, it's the seventy-first year, the taverns have been replaced by drugstores, the sheriff has gone to work for the police, and the cowboys have become complete drug addicts. Oh, and one more thing: they're not all kids anymore.

One of the most important qualities of Gus Van Sant as a director has always been his ability to create something much deeper and philosophical on the basis of simple and somewhat banal plots, often having minimal relation to what is stated in the official synopsis. Roughly speaking, if you expect from “Drugstore Cowboy” an honest and believable story about the everyday life of drug addicts with an obligatory moral in the finale, you won't get it - for that you'd better turn to Danny Boyle or Darren Aronofsky. There will be no praised atmosphere of the seventies either, and the movie was not created for its sake. Occupying the whole first part of the screen time, close-ups of syringes, bubbles and pills, which will be replaced in a while by sharpeners and tea bags filmed in the same style, are served rather as a background for a story about eternal teenagers who didn't want to grow up. This largely explains the classic raid scene, which is more like a mayhem organized in a toy house by boys from across the street, making Bob's invented rules ridiculous not so much in their ridiculousness as in the fact that he believes in them wholeheartedly. The childish determination to prove everything to everyone is justified by the act of the doll-like Nadine, who is tired of being on the dole all the time. It is also striking that Bob, who invented a cruel prank for the policemen who were watching him, is incredibly similar to a child showing his friends a puppet show and not really caring that the puppets were replaced by live people. That's why Officer Gentry, who himself at one point resembles a little boy sitting in a tree house and not noticing that he hardly fits in there, will never understand the meaning of the words “hat” and “teledeti” - it's not his company, and the code words they invented won't tell him anything.

There is another hidden line in “Drugstore Cowboy” that connects it to “Dope Night” and “Idaho Private Eye” not only chronologically but also ideologically. What happens to Bob near the finale is the price he had to pay to move on. It is no longer as negligible as it was in Van Sant's naive and lucid debut movie, but it will not be fully revealed until two years later. Here the key is one of the final shots - a black dog, which appears right after the words “Maybe I'll survive” and either accidentally or deliberately evokes associations with a tall, handsome guy beaten to a pulp, in whom there is almost nothing left of the twenty-six-year-old boy who robbed drugstores. Old, skinned, with a bandaged head and tail, but still alive, and that's probably the most important thing. And what happens to Bob next is nobody's business but his own - after all, it's just a game. And there is a very high probability that he is bored with it.