Metacritic reviews

Drugstore Cowboy is one of the best films in the long tradition of American outlaw road movies - a tradition that includes "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy" and "Badlands."

Gus Van Sant's direction here is supremely confident, fusing witty camerawork, neat editing, and a jazz-oriented score to make Drugstore Cowboy an exhilaratingly bumpy ride.

No previous drug-themed film has the honesty or originality of Gus Van Sant's drama Drugstore Cowboy.

Van Sant gives his material shape and an invigorating, syncopated style. It keeps coming at you in surprising, dazzling ways.

Certainly one of the best drug movies ever made.... Great performances make this dispassionate study a memorable experience.

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's fresh, gutsy societal underbelly film, never wallows in picturesque down-and-outism, except at the end, when Dillon's character, frightened by the death of a girl he didn't like much and spooked by his own paranoiac suspicion, checks into a seedy hotel while trying to go cold turkey and not yield to the influence of a junkie priest drolly played by William Burroughs. [27 Oct 1989]

Neither federally admonishing nor irresponsibly romantic, Cowboy stays high without being highhanded.

Adapted by Van Sant and Daniel Yost from an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle, this 1989 feature has the kind of stylistic conviction that immediately wins one over.

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant Jr.'s glum, absorbing film about a clan of heroin addicts who travel around the Pacific Northwest Looting pharmacies of their supplies the way Bonnie and Clyde cleaned out banks, gives Matt Dillon the role of his career.

Drugstore Cowboy improves. Not much, but in provocative ways.