Stories from the AIDS epidemic: this film tells a story based on a real individual, a tough, homophobic rodeo cowboy, Ron, who was diagnosed with AIDS. He's horrified when he finds out, not because he's just received a death sentence, but because people will think he's a queer. In a flashback sequence, during a wild drug and liquor debauched orgy, he seems to recall or not a brief encounter with another man, and I imagine his deep shame as his payback is visited upon him. I could be wrong about this: my husband points out that he could have contracted AIDS from a woman or a needle.
The background song here should be the old country ballad "…love,o careless love…look what careless love has done to me."
Ironically he cannot get AZT legally in the U.S. because the FDA has lagged in developing remedies for the disease. Ron goes to Mexico and finds medicines there that alleviate his condition.
Despite his poor judgment, he's not a stupid man, and he figures out how to import drugs for AIDS victims and sell them illegally, building a thriving business. Various government law enforcement agencies pursue and thwart his efforts. It's a damning perspective on bureaucracy and its failures, all the more sad because Ron's drug "cocktails" extend many lives, while early AZT drug trials actually kill some patients because dosages were too strong and suppressed the immune system too much.
Rejected cruelly by his own friends, he teams up with a gay transvestite to sell, and his own homophobia is eroded away until he comes to a life-embracing spiritual wholeness. In the most memorable scene in the film, he enters a butterfly incubation chamber and hundreds of them land all over him, and a look of wonder and gentle surprise covers his face as grace covers him over.
Matthew McConaughy, Jared Leto and Jennifer Garner all give strong, memorable performances - how good the actors are, I'm always amazed. But they don't need to lift the material, the whole film is wholly fine.
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