Set in Portland, Oregon, in 1971, this amiable, no-nonsense account of the exploits of a quartet of junkies who live together (Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, and Heather Graham) fully lives up to the promise of Mala Noche, director Gus Van Sant’s previous feature. Based on an unpublished autobiographical novel by James Fogle that Van Sant adapted with Daniel Yost, the movie has the kind of stylistic conviction that immediately wins one over, conveying something of a junkie’s inner life (in the film’s editing rhythms, unorthodox use of sudden close-ups, and Dillon’s offscreen narration, as well as in a few hallucinatory passages) and the outer necessities of the life-style (which, in this case, include many drugstore robberies and changes of address). The characters are all quirky and life-size (the Dillon character’s superstitiousness is one of the principal motors of the plot, and the story’s outcome doesn’t prove him wrong), and, as with the burglaries in Breaking In, the treatment of drugs is refreshingly free of either moralizing or romanticizing. It’s one indication of Van Sant’s ease and assurance that he’s the first director to successfully integrate the persona of William S. Burroughs in a fiction film: all of the actors are used expertly, but it’s Burroughs, cropping up near the end, who articulates the film’s sociopolitical moral in a contemporary context. (Fine Arts)