A bruising, beautiful story of survival against the bleakest of odds.

Rating: 9/10 (22 January 2014)

For almost two decades, the intense, thought-provoking script for Dallas Buyers Club made the rounds in Hollywood. At various points in its troubled, scrappy lifetime, directors like Marc Forster and Craig Gillespie and actors including Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling had been attached to the project. Each time, plans fell through and the movie never got made. Finally, in 2013, this last incarnation of Dallas Buyers Club - sensitively directed by Vallée and starring McConaughey as a physically ravaged victim of AIDS - was cobbled together on a paltry budget of US$5 million. The result is electrifying, and easily one of the best films of 2013.
Ron Woodroof (McConaughey) is a fast-living, rough-talking rodeo cowboy and electrician - a man of bigoted, homophobic views, who's living and dying in Dallas in 1985. He doesn't realise how swiftly he's dying, however, until a chance accident lands him in hospital, where he's diagnosed with HIV and given thirty days to live. Desperate and determined not to give in to his diagnosis, Ron bribes a hospital worker to get him samples of experimental drug AZT. When he realises that AZT might be more harmful than helpful, he starts smuggling unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into the country - first for his own personal use, then for the fellow AIDS victims who join his Dallas Buyers Club.
Dallas Buyers Club certainly sounds like it might be an exercise in sentimental claptrap: a difficult man is softened by his illness and receives a second lease on life, during which he becomes a champion for the very individuals against whom he used to harbour irrational, discriminatory hate. It hardly seems original, and should be something you've seen a hundred times before.
But Vallée's film burns bright and fierce, in much the same way as Ron does. The character work in Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack's screenplay is sublime. Rude, ornery and devilishly confident, Ron remains a prickly bastard throughout, strangely selfless in how gloriously selfish he is. At one point, he's offered the use of a house to conduct his largely illegal business - and he just can't fathom how or why people would want to help him out for free. He staggers and swaggers through the film, refusing to die when the doctors say he should, tough and confrontational to the end.
The people who come into Ron's life when all his friends have left it are just as lovingly realised. The unlikely bond between Ron and Rayon (Leto) – an AIDS-positive transgender woman – forms the emotional cornerstone of the film. Rayon first falls afoul of Ron's casual discrimination before she becomes an essential part of his business. The way in which she takes up residence in his life is executed skilfully - in small rather than big gestures, in tiny moments that build into a spiky, credible friendship that's all the more effective for being so genuine.
Ron's relationship with Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner) is similarly well-developed. It begins in adversarial fashion, with Eve no doubt writing Ron off as a jerk when he practically explodes with denial over his diagnosis. But Eve, too, gets a second chance in life to go on a smaller journey, as she tries to reconcile her chosen profession with its almost callous disregard for the millions of HIV-positive people who are wasting away without access to drugs that might actually help them.
Anyone who's not watched Dallas Buyers Club might wonder why McConaughey and Leto have been scooping up accolades galore during awards season. Cynics will chalk it up to the extreme physical transformations they both underwent for the sake of the film. McConaughey lost 21kg off his sun-bronzed, muscle-bound frame; he is skin stretched across bone, older and more fragile than you've ever seen him. Leto shed almost 14kg for his role, before donning a layer of make-up and an array of skirts.
But it's what the duo do with their ravaged bodies that's truly remarkable. McConaughey has spent the last two years steadily chipping away at his rom-com past, and seals the deal with Ron Woodroof. He is staggeringly good in the part, refusing to water down the character or make an obvious play for audiences' hearts. Instead, he disappears almost completely into Ron's stubborn refusal to accept his death sentence - it's somehow touching that, in McConaughey's hands, Ron's vulnerability doesn't shine through in a scene when he breaks down and sobs, but in a tender, odd moment in a greenlit room full of butterflies.
Leto, too, is unforgettable as Rayon, who shimmers through the film - a bright, swirling mess of life, love and, tragically, addiction. It would be easy to marvel solely at Leto's physical transformation, but there's so much more to his performance. Rayon feels achingly real, her heartbreak and yearning trapped inside a body that doesn't fit the way it should.
It would be easy to assume the worst of Dallas Buyers Club - to think that it'd be predictable and gloomy, brooding and preachy in its misappropriation of Ron's life. Certainly, it leaves out some crucial facts to create a more streamlined story: Ron had a sister and daughter who don't feature in the film at all, and AZT is demonised to an extent that ignores its life-saving properties for AIDS patients in lowered dosages (save for a title card in the end credits).
Taken for what it is, however, the unexpectedly funny Dallas Buyers Club is a beautiful heartbreaker of a film: one that, like its main character, teeters constantly on the edge of death, but is really about the power, joy and possibilities of life. Ron Woodroof is the unlikeliest of heroes, because he's not a hero at all: just an ordinary man who - while fighting, scheming and hustling for his life - figures out a way to help other people too. It's as prickly, complex and oddly uplifting as any story about hope and survival can be.