The cast of this film is made up of professional actors and non-professional amateurs who have been picked because they are real people. These non-professionals were chosen since they are actual drug addicts, and their lives, as you will see, revolve around heroin: getting high on it and finding ways to secure it in the first place. Among those who have no acting experience are Dusty and Sweets McGee, a couple who tried dabbling initially but went on to become full-blown addicts. We follow them, and others like them, drifting through their days and nights...
We had to take director Floyd Mutrux's word for it that many of those we saw were genuine junkies, because there was no other way of telling; certainly not many of them ever turned up in anything again, and listening to their monologues and dialogues you can agree there's the ring of authenticity about the experiences they relate, mainly down to them being so mundane and depressing. One of many drugs films which had their roots in Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm, perhaps this was more convincing than others, and set out the template for drug addiction movies having to be as realistic as possible.
After all, for all its moves towards fantasy sequences even Trainspotting had to portray the suffering that goes hand in hand with heroin as authentically as it could, or else nobody would have thought it worthwhile, and that film as with others like it could trace such stylings back to Dusty and Sweets McGee. Another aspect which would be more apparent in its moves towards appealing to a particular market was the extensive use of pop and rock music on the soundtrack; it was not George Lucas who originated such things in American Graffiti, as here you could hear Mutrux using classic oldies to reference happier times in his addicts' lives and contrasting them with more up to date and sadder songs.
This was effective up to a point, and that point was fairly early on as the poignancy of their wasted lives going nowhere was conveyed with economy and even a touch of imagination, but after that you couldn't help but notice there was no plot here. Was it a documentary? There were parts with the dealers - played by actors - which looked like some low budget crime drama, yet the conversations and reminiscences with the junkies were more loosely assembled and had the tone of eavesdropping on a chat about nothing in particular except the aimlessness of their existence. There was a career addict who tells of his endeavours to stay out of prison but still breaks the law and secure his drugs, but then there were the teenage couple who had lost all hope at a very early age.
