There is humor in their lives - craziness almost always breeds humor - and there also is deeply buried hurt, as in the scene where the Dillon character goes to visit his mother (Grace Zabriskie). Up until this point in the movie, we have seen him primarily through his own eyes, and grown to like him, a little, for the resourceful way he is trying to lead his team of losers.

Then his mother refuses to let him into the house - not because she doesn't love him, but because she knows him too well and knows he will steal anything to get money for drugs. The way he has to stand there and accept this, and try to shrug it off, provides one of the most painful scenes in the movie.

Life falls into a rhythm of excitement and ennui. And their lives drift imperceptibly from bad to worse. There is a way in which desperate people can accept the conditions of their lives, up to a point, and then there is the unmistakable day when that point has been passed.

For this family, that day comes when the teenage girl overdoses and they are stuck with a corpse in their room at a motel where a deputy sheriff's convention is being held. It is a tribute to the sure hand of the director, Gus Van Sant Jr., that this scene works through irony and desperation, instead of through the cheap laughs another director might have settled for.

"Drugstore Cowboy" is a story told with a thread of insane logic that makes it one of the most absorbing movies in a long time. It is a logic that many drug abusers would understand. It goes like this: I feel bad, and drugs make me feel good, although they are also why I feel bad. But since they make me feel good now, and bad later, I will worry about later when the time comes.

Eventually, for the Dillon character, the time does come, and he tells his wife he is heading back to Seattle to get into some kind of a program and try to kick drugs. He has the intelligence to see that things are out of control, that he no longer can make them hold together, that he has lost the fight and had better surrender before his corpse also is somebody else's problem.