See Dallas Buyers Club at Coronado Village Theatre

Dallas Buyers Club is the loosely-based film adaptation of the final years of Texas cowboy Ron Woodroof’s life, after he is diagnosed with AIDS and given thirty days to live. The year being 1985, when HIV was a new and misunderstood disease, Woodroof (McConaughey) is shunned from his companions because they believe him to be gay. He resorts to finding his own “treatments” for his disease, mainly illegal, like AZT, which a South-of-the-border Doctor gives him in mass quantities. Woodroof formulates a plan to sell the AZT and other drugs from Mexico, Japan, China and Israel for a monthly fee of $400 to his “buyer’s club”, a group of outcasts including transgender Rayon, whom he meets in the hospital (Leto). The relationship between Woodroof and Leto, though tinged with tough-love, is overall business-like.

The film scored McConaughey a coveted Oscar nomination, and Leto was honored with a Golden Globe for his performance as Rayon. The performances are mesmerizing, intense, and raw. McConaughey and Leto both cause those in the audience to squirm in the face of such realistic performances: Woodroof is shown as a racist, homophobic, hard partier and Rayon as more kindhearted. Moviegoer Keelin Shaughnessy said, “I will pay to see any movie that Jared Leto is a woman in.”

Truly, the film is gritty and serious: cocktails of drugs, strings of profanity, and severe performances from the entire Buyers cast remind all that the desire to live, which becomes a disease for Woodroof almost as much as his HIV is, causes men to take any chances to elongate their lives.