Drugstore Cowboy (1989) on Netflix
In 1971 Portland, Oregon, Bob Hughes leads a group of addicts: his wife Dianne, his friend Rick and Rick's girlfriend Nadine. They rob drugstores and hospitals. Detective Gentry watches them.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/1043,437 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bob Hughes is 26 and heads a small group of addicts in Portland, Oregon, in 1971. Dianne is his wife, Rick is his closest friend, and Nadine is Rick's teenage girlfriend. The four travel the Pacific Northwest, taking drugs from pharmacies and hospitals. They rob a pharmacy near their home, drive back to use what they took, and David turns up wanting Dilaudid. Bob says they have none and trades him morphine for speed instead. Gentry, a detective, thinks they robbed the pharmacy.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Tom Waits was Gus Van Sant's first choice for the lead role of Bob Hughes, but the film's finance company would not back the production if he were cast; Van Sant suspected the real reason was that the backers, having also financed Kiss of the Spider Woman, now wanted a lead who could win an Oscar.
- Kelly Lynch won the role of Dianne by drawing on her own past: after a head-on car crash at twenty broke both her legs and nearly cost her their amputation, doctors abruptly cut off her painkillers and she went through a brutal withdrawal, which she used to convince her agent she was right for the part and was cast the same day she auditioned.
- James LeGros and Heather Graham won their roles after Gus Van Sant cast them based on Polaroid photos he had taken of them and pinned to a wall, a process producer Nick Wechsler compared to Andy Warhol's methods, saying Graham's photo "just popped."
- Composer Elliot Goldenthal wrote one of his earliest scores for the film using a range of instruments run through a synthesizer instead of an orchestra, and it marked his first collaboration with music producer Richard Martinez, a partnership that continued on many later projects.
