Review: ‘Dallas Buyer’s Club’

Based on a true story, Dallas Buyers Club is a stunningly good film featuring outstanding performances from both Matthew McConoughey and Jared Leto.

McConaughey plays redneck electrician Ron Woodroof. He’s a pretty contemptible human being, a heavy drinking, drug snorting, womanising rodeo rider whose homophobia runs deep. When he learns he’s contracted HIV and probably has only 30 days to live, he’s willing to do whatever he can to survive.

He discovers AZT is the only drug that might give him a few more months, but can’t get into a clinical trial. So he pays a hospital employee to steal it for him.

But the drug doesn’t help as much as he hoped, and he starts looking for other options. Woodroof begins obsessively researching medications and suppliers and starts bringing large quantities of medicine into the country. Medicine which he distributes to other HIV sufferers… for a fee.

Helping him in this mission is a transvestite druggie, Rayon. It may seem like an unlikely partnership given Woodroof’s attitude to gays, but he needs her contacts in the community. And soon their relationship is much more than just a convenient business one.

As Rayon, Jared Leto is incredible, seizing the film’s emotional core and making it his own. But it’s McConoughey’s brash, swaggering, emaciated Woodroof that will stick in your mind long after you leave the theatre.

It’s difficult to remember the eighties AIDS era, but this film reminds us of the terror and uncertainty we all felt as this new plague started picking people off, one by one.

Definitely one of the best of the 2013.

8.5/10

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