Lorraine Bracco Drug abuse is not a pretty sight.
Manhattan abuses drugs in the sense of exploiting their lure while creating a cautionary tale.
Drugs are the topic that sells this story but the movie mostly reports the moral and social degradation caused by drugs while leaving out, for the most part, the exhilarating rush that is their appeal. Rather than evidence of some social agenda on the part of the filmmakers, such oversights are probably due more to narrative inaptitude on the part of music-video director Kalvert who, with this project, crosses over to feature filmmaking. These characters do not develop over the course of the movie. As the movie would have it, Carroll goes straight from glue-sniffing to a few whiffs of cocaine, to a handful of pharmaceuticals, and then directly to a monster heroin dependency. At that point, Carroll and his pals are portrayed as full-blown degenerates who snatch purses, assault strangers, and hustle tricks in public men's rooms.