Based on the true story of Ron Woodroof published in Dallas Life Magazine/Dallas Morning News, Dallas Buyers Club is tough to watch, squicky to those who don’t want to see coke-fueled threesomes, and deals with subject matter that could cause you to want to throw things in frustration as you watch human beings repeatedly get the shaft.  It’s also brilliant filmmaking, with performances by Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto and Jennifer Garner that will blow you away.  That makes it a top choice for your Awards Season movie budget, and after you see it?  Well, thank me later.  Just take a gander at all that jibber-jabber cluttering up the movie poster above.  All that praise is true enough, and richly deserved.

It’s 1985.  Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughay) is doing what any other electrician/rodeo star/con-man would do.  Lots of dirty, nasty coke and lots more dirty, nasty women.  Cut to the doctor’s office; Ron, looking like a cross between the Alien Queen and Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, has AIDS.  Not just HIV.  He’s trashed his body with all sorts of grade-Z crap, and it’s cried Uncle.  Docs tell Ron he’s got 30 days to live.  What he does next is the plot of Dallas Buyers Club: he decides to skip the craptastic AZT medications on offer at the time (note: AZT was an effective medicine…once everyone knew how to use it, and what to combine it with) and smuggle less dangerous, more effective natural treatment combinations across the border.

Naturally, the FDA is less than pleased.  Painted as the Big Bad here (not without cause; ask anyone who was involved in ACT UP during this period of history), the face of which is FDA Investigator Richard Barkley (played by Michael O’Neill, Seabiscuit) who is a man that has a mission.  And that mission is to crush distributors of “illegal drugs”.  Barkley is a bulldozer that uses tunnel vision to accomplish his goals, and perhaps to shield his psyche from the fact that he was snatching help from the dying.

Jared Leto plays Rayon, a transgendered woman whose drug addition has not only wracked her body, it’s given her HIV.  She helps Ron, but not after a good bit of back-and-forth from Ron, who has always considered himself a “real man”, not a “pipe smoker”.  Leto also shed weight for the film, but I was too busy gawking at his brilliant performance to notice exactly how thin he’d become.  Leto’s Rayon is a gentle soul that has had to fight for what she has, and Leto brings a softness and humanity to a role that could have been the usual finger-snapping cliche.  Leto is so staggeringly brilliant in his performance that it’s easy to see why folks like Entertainment Weekly have said that this year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar is “his to lose”.  So yeah, put him down in your Oscar pool, it’s practically a lock.

Jennifer Garner proves to people that don’t “do” indie films that she’s more than just an Alias one-off that makes pretty babies with Ben Affleck.  Her Dr. Eve Saks is a woman torn; she’s trying to help save the lives of AIDS and HIV patients, but knows that AZT as it was being used in the mid-80s was doing those patients no favors.  Here, Saks is a woman who is used to living life in her lab, visiting her patients.  But when Ron Woodroof upsets the status quo, she feels compelled to take a stand herself, and Garner blazes to life, doing an amazing job of breathing life into her character’s personal arc.  Saks’ quiet fortitude is the Yang to Woodroof’s slick charmer Yin, and the two actors work well together.  While Leto is sparking in every scene he’s in, Garner and McConaughey truly take off when they’re on screen together.

Wanna know what else is awesome?  This soundtrack, and the fact that a part of the proceeds to  Project(RED)…and that there’s a track from Leto’s band 30 Seconds To Mars.  The little things that are casually tossed in but somehow make the movie really come together (Marc Bollan photos, anyone?)  The crazy-perfect period costuming; man, can we say that nobody looked good in those high-waisted mom jeans?  And can we also give props to Garner for putting ’em on and getting on the big screen wearing those horrors?  And my personal favorite; nerdgasam sightings, thanks to True Blood‘s Russell Edgington Denis O’Hare as Saks’ boss, and The Walking Dead‘s Milton Dallas Roberts as the Club’s compassionate but frazzled lawyer guy.

Enough already.  Just go.  Get thee to a theater.  Pony up for Dallas Buyers Club. The end.  Y’know, of this review.