In Dallas Buyers’ Club, Matthew McConaughey inhabits the role of a lifetime. At the dawn of the AIDS era, before triple therapy drug regimens, before billions of dollars of research into retrovirus life cycles, before HIV became just another STD, a Dallas electrician named Ron Woodruff contracted the virus, possibly in 1981 from an IV drug user in a one-night stand. Like so many others then, the disease smoldered, slowly killing off his body’s immune system. A chance visit to the ER reveals a T cell count of 9, and virus teeming in his blood stream. He’s given 30 days to live.
His response? Find a threesome, and load up on as much coke and booze as he can afford. Within a week, though, his symptoms no longer in hiding, he seeks out the microfilm in his local library, and learns about drug trials just getting started. Ron is a go-getter, not one to necessarily follow a doctor’s advice. He quickly advances from bribing hospital maintenance staff for bottles of the study drug, AZT, to smuggling over the border a drug cocktail recommended by a disgraced US medic running a clinic in Mexico.
The drugs keep him alive, but don’t come free. To finance his habit, he offers to be the conduit for the underground of other AIDS patients in North Texas, giving them access to meds that aren’t yet approved by the FDA.
The Food and Drug Administration, charged with assuring safety of new medications above all else, has begun to butt up against the growing assertiveness of the gay community. Out of the shadows and closets, people who’ve lived with being shunned and condemned all their lives find themselves now with truly nothing left to lose. Loud and proud, they protest the procedures which require years and three levels of testing before new drugs are released for general use.
Ron is not politically motivated. He just wants to stay alive longer, and hustle a living. Along the way, he finds common purpose with others thrust forward as reluctant heroes by the epidemic: the doctors who find themselves trying to understand both the disease and the outcasts who have been afflicted, and those outcasts themselves. Jennifer Garner serves the former role, a physician who slowly comes to accept that the standards of scientific proof she has operated under mean little to people who facing an immediate death sentence. And Jared Leto, playing a wildly erratic transgender patient, brings wit and pathos in equal measures.
DBC is primarily a biography, relying on 20 hours of interviews screenwriter Chris Borten held with Woodruff a month or so before his death in 1992. Collusion between federal bureaucrats and the drug companies they are supposed to be overseeing, and the struggles of AIDS patients and their physicians to chart a treatment program which fits the demands of the wasting illness, are part of the background of Woodruff’s story. But in the forefront is the man as a force of nature. Crude, possibly homophobic and racist, a lover of life sapping drugs (including alcohol and nicotine), he’s played with total commitment by McConaughey. MM (a good acronym for the actor formerly known as America’s sexiest man) shed 40 pounds for the role. Employing swagger, facial tics, braggadocio, and the easiest way with a cigarette since Bogart, he mesmerizes on the screen.
McConaughey, after an interlude in a series of half-hearted romantic comedies, and seemingly on the way to lightweight oblivion while skating by on looks and charm, has returned to his early promise as an actor with the engagement and integrity of Paul Newman or Steve McQueen. Dallas Buyers’ Club, Mud, The Lincoln Lawyer, and HBO’s True Detective all feature him as a charismatic loner, prowling the edges of polite society with a subdued fever, never quite reaching the heights, but all the more human for it.