Focus Features

For two such extraordinary prose writers, Joan Didion and husband John Gregory Dunne sure do write some mediocre screenplays: the Michelle Pfeiffer anchorwoman vehicle, Up Close and Personal, is absolutely shameful, and the Vegas-style attempt to make Streisand into a rock star, A Star is Born, is as screwy as the shaggy curls of Barbra’s hair during that particularly pathetic epoch in her career. The Panic in Needle Park is no work of genius either—and I still have trouble imagining a bunch of junkies crowding in a median on 72nd Street, even back when the Upper West Side was unyuppified. But the dead-end feel of Al Pacino’s performance, which was his signature style in that Serpico-era, is so dismayingly derelict and morose, which is what life as a junkie is like. One of the rare drug films that gets the feeling of damp boredom—all day long, just waiting to get fixed—very right on. 

To be perfectly truthful, when I saw this movie—at an American New Wave festival at the Film Forum in New York in 1996—I was myself in the throes of a first-rate relationship with an assortment of mind enhancers, so my memory of the thing itself is slender and sketchy. But like the Los Angeles street kids in this documentary-style film, my most intense love at the time was heroin, and as I recall I felt that the characters I was watching on screen were hung up in the same irrational schoolgirl-crush-gone-wrong that I was. There is a would-be love scene that shows two junkies shooting up while Van Morrison sings “Into The Mystic,” and I promise you that after seeing it, foghorns will never sound quite the same to you again. Somehow, Dusty and Sweets McGee is bleak about life on dope, and rapturous about dope itself, which is really what the whole mess is about. Along with the contemporaneous Two-Lane Blacktop, this is surely one of those lost movies that really ought to be found.

The genius of America—starting from the time we turned a bloody revolution into a functioning government—is the way our form of capitalism incorporates anything edgy into the system, and cashes in on rebellion. Urban Outfitters is the chain-store version of that business model. And of course, all those hippies were in fact from the bourgeoisie, so sticking a bunch of them in a Broadway show and reducing the whole thing to style kind of revealed the movement for what a bunch of tie-dyed pie-in-the-sky it really was. When Milos Forman’s grandiose film version was released with Twyla Tharp’s statuesque choreography it was greeted as a spectacularly expensive mess. In fact, the movie gives plot to what was a wisp of a musical play, and highlights fantastically charismatic performances by Treat Williams and Beverly D’Angelo, before they’d been found and forgotten.

Denis Johnson’s very short book of very, very short stories about the junkie lifestyle of shag carpets and plaid couches in places like Ketchum, Idaho or Jefferson City, Missouri is such a favorite of mine that I got it included in my law school curriculum—even though there are no judges or attorneys in the whole collection. This is the rare pleasurable occasion where the film version complements the literary rendering—you should see it and read it, in either order, neither ruins the other. The reason Jesus’ Son has such perfect pitch is that even though there are enough scenes of fixing up works and cooking up dope to get anyone with the inclination salivating like a Bassett hound, it’s really about people who happen to use drugs—it’s not about drugs. For those unfamiliar with the effects of mind-altering substances, there is an emblematic episode with Billy Crudup and Jack Black as two high-flying hospital orderlies. Caught mopping the corridor floor, the tripping pair are asked if they are doing this again, and they matter-of-factly reply, “No. Still.”

While American Beauty was filling seats in cineplexes, in the theaters a few doors down, PT Anderson’s Magnolia, a far better and more ambitious meditation on the same subject with the same floranymous quality, was playing to emptier houses—probably because in its honest contemplation of evil and regret, it was too much for the masses. But American Beauty is symmetrical and seamless as a subdivision in every which way, and while it does nothing for suburbia that John Cheever and John Updike had not done years before, it does do something really great for marijuana: it makes it normal. Which is what the drug has become in recent years. It’s the green martini, the wake-‘n-bake treat, sold door-to-door by the Girl Scout next door or the housewife around the corner, to the tax attorney or the orthopedic surgeon whose version of the Lord’s Prayer is something like: Give us this day, our daily trance. Now we have Weeds on a weekly basis, but American Beauty was pop culture’s first pot delivery service.