Dusty and Sweets McGee

Pam and Larry, Tip, Kit Ryder, Dusty, Sweets, Armen and Bobby Graham are real people, they are not actors. So begins, with this disclaimer, Floyd Mutrux’s first film, one of the very few works in the series to be distributed by a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros. released the film, briefly, in the summer of 1971). An impressionistic study of the loaded life in Los Angeles starring actual heroin addicts, Dusty and Sweets McGee captures the languorous rhythms of scoring and shooting up through an artful blend of scripted and vérité episodes. Nearly impossible to see for many years, the film has its champions. “As an elegy to wasted youth,” the filmmaker Thom Andersen has written, “Dusty and Sweets McGee is irresistible. We weren’t all heroin addicts, but we all more or less wasted our youth—and I know it’s not any easier for young people today. It’s a cliché, but American movies really were better then. Movies about junkies and drug dealers have gotten a lot flashier since Dusty and Sweets McGee, but they haven’t been able to recapture its lyricism, its sense of wonder, or even its humor.”