Dallas Buyers Club - B

Rated R, 117 minutes

Brave performances highlight the inspiring "Dallas Buyers Club"

Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodruff

The new film "Dallas Buyers Club" is not an easy film to watch, but it's an inspiring look at the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and the absorbing, moving performances will stay with you much more than its generic script. Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey) is a straight Dallas, Texas electrician by day, and rodeo party boy by night, and also a heavy drug user.  He contracts HIV and is given only 30 days to live. When heavy doses of AZT don't work, with the help of his doctor (Jennifer Garner) and a fellow HIV patient, a transgender man named Rayon (Jared Leto), he forms the Dallas Buyers Club and begins buying and selling unapproved FDA drugs in exchange for monthly memberships. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee and written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack and based in part on a lengthy Dallas Morning News Article about Woodruff, "Dallas Buyers Club" is most memorable for the mesmerizing, very brave turns by McConaughey and Leto, both strikingly emaciated and charming at the same time and under their guise, HIV has never been more entertaining. Both should and will be remembered come Oscar time, and it's a testament to their talent that the acting is better than the movie itself as both actors hold the screen and will hold your interest, even when the script doesn't. The downbeat story is a challenge to present, altering many characters and facts (Garner and Leto's characters are among the many composite characters here), and as shocking as some of the homophobic slurs still are, they otherwise don't truly present anything new. The primary point is to show how Woodruff overcame his own fears to work with others in fighting the disease, and on that note, it's an honorable one. "Dallas Buyers Club" is a flawed film (it wasn't even filmed in Dallas), but it takes on risks of a provocative subject matter, and for that reason it comes recommended, both satisfying and enormously entertaining.

Wes's Grade: B