Dallas Buyers Club – Matthew McConaughey gives the best performance of anyone’s career

Although you’ll have heard that Dallas Buyers Club is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career, I know you won’t believe it unless you hear it directly from me so here you are: it is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career. In fact, it may be the best performance of anyone’s career. It’ll blow your tiny minds. It blew my tiny mind. ‘That blew my tiny mind,’ I even said afterwards, so it has to be true. Dallas Buyers Club is based on the real story of Ron Woodroof, a difficult hero. Ron, when we first encounter him, is attending a rodeo and having rushed, seedy sex with two women in one of the holding pens. Ron drinks, snorts coke, rides bulls and struts about in a Stetson, with one of those cock-of-the-walk, macho gaits. He is no great respecter of the ladies, and is also profoundly homophobic, as are his unappealing friends. He’s like you always imagined the Marlboro Man would be.

But then an accident at work sends him to hospital where they discover his T-cell blood count is down to nine. It’s 1985, the year Rock Hudson died of Aids, and Ron is infected, through having unprotected sex with a drug-using woman, probably. The doctors give him 30 days to live. He walks out on them, snarling: ‘I’m no faggot.’ He then makes the journey from denial — vigorous denial — to medical activism, taking on the FDA, but this isn’t like other medical activism movies. It isn’t like, say, Erin Brockovich or Lorenzo’s Oil as it never goes all soft and uplifting. Ron never seeks our affection or sympathy, but somehow wins both. This is what gives the film it’s complexity, and depth, and makes it so astounding.