Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky (Pi, The Wrestler)
Starring: Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Ellen Burstyn, Marlon Wayans
Called “one of the most disturbing movies ever made” by Entertainment Weekly, Requiem for a Dream is not for the weak of 
Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly star as the (suspiciously good-looking) addicts whose hopes of a big score are slowly, painfully chipped away. Connelly and Leto’s initially sweet young love soon decays into prostitution and jail time.
Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-nominated role as Leto’s elderly mother begins with a simple dream of being on her favorite television show; hope morphs into obsession and eventually into a pill-fueled hallucinatory nightmare in which her household appliances are closing in on her.
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Trainspotting (1996)
Directed by: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Days Later)
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd
Where Requiem for a Dream never cracks a smile, Trainspotting is one seedy, yellow-toothed grin. Irreverent and chock-full of stellar performances, Danny Boyle’s early film documents the lives of a group of young Scottish heroin addicts. It features a killer soundtrack and one long sardonic monologue that begins, “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television,” and ends with “I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?” This mantra has since graced the walls of college kids across the world, but it’s hard to argue that the film glamorizes drug use.
An emaciated, punked-out Ewan McGregor stars as the blue-collar Renton, who steals from his mother (and retirement homes) in order to feed his habit. He’s flanked by a troupe of equally grimy miscreants with names like “Sick Boy” and “Spud,” who spend their days brawling in bars and making weak passes at tart-tongued women.
The film is a sprawling, ugly series of anecdotes; at its lightest, we see Renton diving into “the worst toilet in Scotland” after lost suppositories; at its darkest, a baby dies from neglect; at its core, the film presses its fresh, jubilant face right up against the dirty, hairy underbelly of addiction.
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Rush (1991)
Directed by: Lili Fini Zanuck (produced Driving Miss Daisy, Cocoon)
Starring: Jason Patric, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Rush tells the story of two undercover narcotics cops who straddle the line between feigning addiction and succumbing to the real thing. The film takes place in the mid-1970s, following fresh-faced rookie cop Kristen and jaded veteran Raynor as they try to build a case against a local bar owner (played by legendary southern rocker Gregg Allman). Raynor considers himself a master of his beat, shooting up to reassure his dealer buddies and encouraging his new partner to do the same.
Deftly acted and tersely directed, the film is a sobering look at two people meant to be the guardians of the gate, being seduced beyond it by each other and the culture around them.
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Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Directed by: Gus Van Sant (Milk, Good Will Hunting)
Starring: Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch
Drugstore Cowboy is an odd pairing of the traditional American outlaw movie and the deadpan starkness of addiction stories. Starring a chisel-cheeked Matt Dillon as Bob Hughes, the movie follows a self-described “drug fiend” who robs drugstores for the drugs (not the money). Hughes begins the film as the classic cowboy—all cocky bravado—but he’s jolted out of his life of crime by the sudden death of his wife. He decides to go straight.
The film is free of moralizing or romanticizing—it’s infused with a wry, black humor. Beat Poet William S. Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch) has a cameo as a junky priest. The ending is one of the more optimistic ones in this list.
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A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson
A Scanner Darkly is a pseudo sci-fi pic set in the not-so-distant future. Nearly the entire world is addicted to a lethal drug called “Substance D,” which is immediately addictive and rapidly causes brain damage—reducing the user to a zombie capable of nothing but the most menial of tasks. The drug has no discernible high, but seems to hook the culture simply because it’s there.
In his best role since Point Break (1991), Keanu Reeves stars as the blurry everyman, a drug addict who daylights as a narc, struggling to hold his identity (and his psyche) together. As an anti-drug agent, he patrols wearing a futuristic form of camouflage—the “scramble suit”—that disguises him not as one person, but everyone at once. (Hello, metaphor.)
A Scanner Darkly is a stunning film that marries live action with an eerie, painted animation, melting the line between reality and creations of the mind. The film also features an all-star cast, including Robert Downey Jr. as the fast-talking paranoid Barris and Woody Harrelson as moron roommate Luckman. We won’t ruin the ending for you, but the film has the airtight momentum of a really good conspiracy theory.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Directed by: Terry Gilliam (Twelve Monkeys, Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
Starring: Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro
Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was once considered an “unfilmable” novel: a questionably autobiographical foray into the feverish, drugged-out stream of consciousness of the famed gonzo journalist.
Terry Gilliam’s interpretation does Thompson’s nihilistic opus justice, even if it fails to communicate the full meaning of the book (what movie does, really?). The film earned its share of bad reviews, but it’s a visual gem, as Gilliam captures the frenetic, kaleidoscopic haze of Vegas on acid (and other stuff).
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Naked Lunch (1991)
Directed by: David Cronenberg (The Fly, A History of Violence)
Starring: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm
Naked Lunch isn’t about drugs specifically, but it does recreate the “vivid, ant-crawling detail [of] the plunge into the hungry abyss of drugs” (the Washington Post). The film follows an exterminator and his wife, both desperately addicted to his own insecticide.
As the film unravels, it gets progressively more surreal, introducing talking typewriters and giant centipedes. Based on William S. Burrough’s novel by the same name, it’s rooted in a kind of truth: Burroughs was prone to “yawning pits of paranoia and schizophrenia”; he accidentally shot his wife at one point in his life.
Critic Roger Ebert described the movie like this:
There is so much dryness, death, and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy. Burroughs inhabits the madhouse of his mind, and as he is addressed by bugs and phantoms and the specter of his murdered wife, the most horrifying thing of all is that he reacts in the same detached, cold way.
♦♦♦
Traffic (2000)
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich; Sex, Lies, and Videotape)
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle, Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones
The American crime drama that earned director Soderberg an Oscar nomination, Traffic follows the illegal Mexican drug trade in a patchwork of stories ranging from the dealers to the abusers to the law enforcers after them.
As Entertainment Weekly put it, “The film doesn’t just juggle characters—it zigzags among sinister pockets of addiction, violence, and power, revealing, in its very structure, the hidden yet interlocked levels of a vertically integrated drug society.”
Most of the film is shot with a handheld camera, lending it a newsreel quality that aids in its final moral: we are losing the war against drugs.
Traffic, like The Godfather, is a memorable demonstration of the notion that crime, while it may be sin, is fundamentally big business. Watching the film, we’re confronted, both as drama and as cultural revelation, with the dirty capitalistic secret of the drug war: that when drugs are wired into a society’s central nervous system, that society will behave, collectively, in as clawing and amoral a fashion as any addict.
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The Basketball Diaries (1995)
Directed by: Scott Kalvert
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg
In one of his acclaimed pre-Titanic roles, DiCaprio portrays a teenage basketball player struggling with heroin addiction. An adaptation of Jim Carroll’s underground memoir, the story follows a well-trodden path: Catholic boy descends into sin, revels in desperation, hits rock bottom, makes a slow recovery.
The beginning of the movie follows Carroll and his buddies as they rampage, steal, and jump off cliffs. Soon, Carroll loses control and begins turning tricks for cash in public toilets. By far the most poignant scene in the film is when Carroll bangs on his mother’s door, wheedling, begging, pleading for drug money until the word “money” becomes one long wail.
Narrated by Carroll’s adolescent poetry, the movie can induce eye-rolling at times, but DiCaprio’s raw, terrifying performance is well worth watching.
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Kids (1995)
Directed by: Larry Clark
Starring: Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson
In what The New York Times called a “wake-up call to the world,” Larry Clark’s Kids centers on a group of skateboarding NYC teenagers and the shocking stupor—and horrifying consequences—of their sex- and drug-fueled lifestyle.
The plot is set into motion by Jennie (Chloe Sevigny), who accompanies a friend to an AIDS test and finds out she herself is positive. The rest of the movie follows her afflicted ex-hookup’s citywide search for his next pubescent exploit—and Jennie’s race to stop him.
New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote:
Mr. Clark, making a fierce, daringly unsentimental directorial debut, gives his audience no relief from the ugliness of his characters’ behavior. He strips Kids of lofty speeches, disapproving parents, and nice-guy heroes, concentrating only on the hedonistic here-and-now.
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Click here to read other stories in this special addiction package from the Good Men Project Magazine.