American Hustler

So I now get why Matthew McConaughey peaced outta playing JFK in Lee Daniels’ The Butler: Playing a real-life AIDS patient from the ’80s in Dallas Buyers Club offered him the meatier showcase.

A bit of an irony, since the actor went the Method route for the part and dropped a ton of weight last year to play Ron Woodroof, a wiry rodeo-loving Texas redneck with a smart mouth and an ever smarter mind for a good ol’ hustle.

Worry not, the McConau-Bod is back.

But I digress.

McConaughey is most excellent in this Jean-Marc Vallée-directed film. He is gritty (the film opens with Ron…uh…engaging with a couple of skanks ladies...in like, a bull pen...during a rodeo, his every thrust mimicking the action out on the dirt), and vulnerable (the actor’s face gradually drowns in fear after getting his summer 1985 30-day death sentence).

But his Ron is also a huckster-like survivalist.

Within those first 30 days (which he kicks off by rebelliously vowing to his doctors, played by American Horror Story’s Denis O’Hare and a noble Jennifer Garner, that there ain’t nothing out there that can kill him in 30 days) we see him weasel his way into what he thinks will be a life-saving solution: an AZT drug trial. It’s a grand idea that he arrives at over drinks...through the power of praying…at the altar of the pole (yes, that pole).

That is Ron, a man who begins to find solutions to problems in a strip joint, and this is the first of many examples of the guy’s under-the-table ingenuity and resolve. He wants to live, and he is more than happy to go at it alone. His redneck buddies have deserted him, taking with them his electrician gig, and he has been evicted from his trailer in a crude manner through some “FAGGOT BLOOD” graffiti.

Ron is super-straight, btw.

When the AZT doesn’t work, when it doesn’t cure him as he maybe thought it would, Ron educates himself, and that’s when every color of his brain is mapped out for us). He ends up in Mexico, sick as a dog with like, nine T cells, getting all these experimental non-FDA-approved drugs and treatments. It’s there that the seed for a buyers club is planted, and where McConaughey shows a canny a restraint that helps avoid a free fall into melodrama territory.

Three months have passed (take that, doctors!) so he figures he’ll monetize his disease and bank on his cleverness back home in Dallas. There is a strong hint of outrage in Ron’s decision to bring back these drugs into the United States, a suggestion that – having learned that AZT as it stood at pre-national dialogue time was nothing more than a Big Pharma/FDA peddle – he selflessly, for a moment, thought it was good thing to do not only for himself but for others.

This comes into focus after Ron meets fellow patient Rayon, an equally savvy transgender woman played by Jared Leto. Their special, completely non-sexual (Garner is the love interest in this one), almost sibling-like relationship gives the film its heart and really translates the growth of Ron as a man.

Leto proves a formidable partner for McConaughey in this regard.

For his first on-screen job in forever, he, too, dropped, a ton of weight for the film. His Rayon is tender where Ron is gruff, and she, in many ways, serves as not only his strength to survive for seven years (and even take a case for his right to be healthy to court) but also as the invaluable prism through which we should look at Dallas Buyers Club.

My Rating ***

Photo: Focus Features.