It's so downbeat that it's not likely to make a dime. Nevertheless, Rush is the most harrowing love story about a couple of drug addicts since the near-classic Panic in Needle Park . That 1971 film made a star of Al Pacino and it won a best actress prize at Cannes for Kitty Winn, who played the relatively innocent girl he dragged with him into a life of heroin addiction, feral behavior and easy betrayal in New York's drug underworld.
Rush is about lovers on the other side of the law, yet in some ways it's the same story.
That's partly the point of the movie, which finds no more glory on the side of addicted undercover narcs than it would if its creators were telling the story of a couple of street outlaws. Pete Dexter's script is based on a 1990 book by Kim Wozencraft, who worked as a Texas narcotics officer at the time, and the language and attitudes never ring false. If there's a problem, it's that the characters are so sketchy they're almost abstract, but the actors manage to fill in most of the blank spaces. The talented first-time director, Lili Fini Zanuck, draws precise performances from everyone, but the standout is Leigh. Aside from a bizarre scene in which a peripheral character suddenly announces his belief in the power of prayer, Rush lacks the wry humor of Naked Lunch , Drugstore Cowboy and other recent films on the subject.