Matt Dillon seems to have improved as an actor over the course of his career. In this film about pharmaceutical drug use, Dillon has the majority of lines and is also the narrator. His performance is disarmingly wooden, and is a constant reminder that he is really an actor reciting his lines, rather than the character he is playing.
In Drugstore Cowboy, Dillon and his wife (played well enough by Kelly Lynch) rob drugstores with a younger couple (James LeGros and Heather Graham, who was actually not bad). The film is basically a story about how that lifestyle is not so simple. The story and the cinematography are both fine - plenty of gloomy shots when things aren't going well, and some beautiful shots of Oregon. However, the directing and editing seem to be off in a hard-to-quantify way. It's not particularly fast or slow, and not all that long at 100 minutes, but the pacing fails to pull the viewer in. The story is not overpowering, so it needs a directorial style which dwells on the atmosphere and feel, which it doesn't get. At times it starts to veer off nicely towards the somewhat surreal (for example, the "hex" scene). Most of the time though, it's very representational, simply presenting the facts, and that more slowly than it could.
As a side note, William S Burroughs was apparently not meant to be an actor, and the way in which his character exists only to make a point is frustratingly blatant. I think this appearance only diminishes him.
In Drugstore Cowboy, Dillon and his wife (played well enough by Kelly Lynch) rob drugstores with a younger couple (James LeGros and Heather Graham, who was actually not bad). The film is basically a story about how that lifestyle is not so simple. The story and the cinematography are both fine - plenty of gloomy shots when things aren't going well, and some beautiful shots of Oregon. However, the directing and editing seem to be off in a hard-to-quantify way. It's not particularly fast or slow, and not all that long at 100 minutes, but the pacing fails to pull the viewer in. The story is not overpowering, so it needs a directorial style which dwells on the atmosphere and feel, which it doesn't get. At times it starts to veer off nicely towards the somewhat surreal (for example, the "hex" scene). Most of the time though, it's very representational, simply presenting the facts, and that more slowly than it could.
As a side note, William S Burroughs was apparently not meant to be an actor, and the way in which his character exists only to make a point is frustratingly blatant. I think this appearance only diminishes him.