DOPE SICK LOVE (2005)
“You got any cum in those balls?”
Directors: Felice Conte, Brent Renaud & Craig Renaud
Cinematography: Brent Renaud & Craig Renaud
Editor: Brent Renaud & Craig Renaud
Notable Cast: Matt, Tracy, Michelle, Sebastian
Here, we now go from metaphorical, cinematic addiction to the real motherfucking deal.
You want a hard hitting, take no prisoners, balls to the wall documentary? You’ve come to the right place. You watch this flick, and it will never leave you. Truly. You will remember lines and images and circumstances for the rest of your days if you sit down to watch. That is how powerful this music and narration free documentary is.
Which is one of its greatest strengths. While I love the music in Apollo 11, and the narration in Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, there’s just something about a documentary that has neither music nor narration.
One of my favorite docs of the past 15 years is 2012’s Leviathan, about a fishing boat in the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s quite experimental and immersive. And it has neither music nor narration, and almost no spoken dialogue. It’s quite extraordinary. It was directed by two people who work at a place called the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Wild shit. If you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out. While it’s great, it’s kind of a one and done type of thing. Hard to see people actually sitting down and watching this, in one sitting, multiple times.
I just can’t see it.
Dope Sick Love, on the other hand, is incredibly entertaining and imminently rewatchable. I’ve seen it dozens of times. Yes, it is dark, yes, it is depressing, yes, it is scary, yes, it is harrowing, but it is never less than compelling. You cannot take your eyes off the screen, even when there’s close ups of them plunging that dirty needle into their emaciated arm.
I have no idea where the filmmakers found these 4 people, or how they convinced them to be in this, or how there’s not one instance of them asking the filmmakers money for drugs. It’s literally “get money, buy drugs, get high, get money, buy drugs, get high” on repeat.
It’s insane. Bleak as fuck.
The merry go round reminds me of that fantastic Just Say No ad from years back.
How great is that? Wish they still had shit like that on TV.
I hear you asking, “what about the 1ST 5 Minutes?”
Alright, come here, motherfucker, come here, let’s fucking go.
1ST 5 MINUTES
https://vk.com/video-136471876_456239814
First thing we see is that this is an HBO Documentary. Man, remember when HBO did good docs? Feels like a thousand centuries ago. I miss the days of good content instead of the cattle slop they force feed on us now. Don’t get me wrong, even back then, HBO put out some shitty docs, but at least there were good to great ones mixed in.
Now, it’s just shit.
But this is 2005, so it’s looking like we’re in capable hands here. The HBO brand conveyed you might get a certain taste level missing from other non-HBO docs at the time.
Then we hear the sounds of the city over black, and then some title cards written in a terrible type of comic sans lite or something, not sure, but it is a travesty. Huge red flag right up front here. Always embarrasses me when watching the movie or recommending it cause it is such a stupid font. It was stupid back then, and remains so now. Huge misstep.
The text reads,
“This film follows the lives of two drug addicted couples
It has no music, narration, or special effects
What you see is what the filmmakers saw over the course of 18 months
Can love survive on the streets of New York?”
Fade to black.
Fade in to a CU of a needle in an arm, frustration as something is wrong, then two men on the street having a conversation about “Yeah, you like uncircumcised guys, right?” to an old man giving a blowjob in a nasty bathroom (“You’re the best, Al.”), CU of twenty dollar bills being counted by a woman, then a dude with a shaved head smoking crack with a disheveled, pimpled young woman in a wood paneled elevator, to a couple throwing shit at each other in the middle of the street, to that same dude with a shaved head pleading for “24 hours away from this madness,” to him getting a needle ready, his tongue outstretched like a goblin, to him kissing the old mustachioed man he was blowing, to him kissing a girl in the backseat of a cab, then blackness and the title, in a similarly awful font, as we hear someone lighting a crack pipe and as he does we see brief flashes of him smoking it in the dark.
I’m not really a fan of starting documentaries with a reality show style “… and coming up tonight, on Dope Sick Love” montage that shows you some of the best bits right up front. I just don’t know what purpose it serves. It’s like a preview or trailer embedded in the movie proper. I’m already sitting down to watch your movie, no need to keep selling me.
While I love everything contained in this montage, it’s simply unnecessary.
We’re a little over a minute in here and I’m not digging some of the creative choices. But that quick preview does promise and indicate some good shit contained herein. Look, as soon as I heard “junkies in love,” I was sold. Let’s see how the filmmakers do once the actual doc starts, cause to me, this whole opening minute could be excised and nothing would be lost. You don’t need the title cards explaining the flick or the preview montage, at all.
Amazed that made it past the first rough cut.
Ah, the movie now starts and the first thing we see is junkie Matt using toilet water with his needle to mix his heroin in the plastic cap of a soda bottle right before shooting up. He’s in the bathroom of the Western Union where his girlfriend, Tracy, is getting wired money from her father. This money, and her father, prove integral to both their habit and their very survival. This time she got a hundred dollars from the old man, which makes them feel like Rockefeller. Matt turns around and says “Let’s go, Jeeves, my bags!” at the sudden windfall.
He lets us know he's already called the crack dealer and the dope dealer, tells us where they’re going to meet, and how he’s gonna “shoot some dope, smoke some crack, fuck some pussy, eat some dick.” You can tell these two have real affection for each other, and an animal attraction despite both of them looking like utter fucking dogshit.
We never see them score the dope or the crack throughout the picture, we always see them on the way to the deal, and then immediately after. Would have been nice to at least have some audio of these encounters, but I understand why they’re absent. Still though, especially with Tracy, where females are known to trade sex for drugs, it would be fascinating to see the dynamics between them and their various dealers. Alas…
We then see them attempting to break into an apartment building so they can get high in peace and away from possible eyes of law enforcement. Tracy seems to specialize in picking locks as she is the lead, and once in, beckons Matt to follow her in. They go into the janitor closet of some random apartment building and use bottle caps to mix their heroin for injection. It’s amazing seeing their process, how precise and attentive they are to the drug and the prep. Tracy whispers a bit of her backstory, went to private school, experimented with drugs, and then met Matt not long after that. It was Matt who introduced her to injecting the heroin, instead of just sniffing it.
I love how when they leave the building they pass some unknowing resident. Wild shit goes down in apartment buildings in New York City, but that’s pretty scary, that junkies just have free reign to break into your building to get high. Thankfully, Matt and Tracy are not dangerous, or don’t seem to be. But what if it’s some psychotic fuck? As I said, scary.
We then cut to our other couple, Michelle and Sebastian, who are themselves trying to get into an apartment building to get high. Instead of picking the lock, their process is just to push every button for every apartment until someone unwittingly lets them in, which they do.
Unreal.
They enter and make for the stairway. With this couple, we immediately notice a pretty significant age gap. Sebastian seems to be in his 20’s, while Michelle seems to be in her 40’s. Maybe they are closer in age, but she looks fucking rough. Skinny as can be, withered face, just nasty. He looks disgusting too, all greasy and scabbed, but he is noticeably less aged. Seems more like a mother and son than actual lovers.
And that wraps up the 1ST 5 Minutes of this gonzo doc. Forgetting the font and opening montage, this is already gripping shit, to see how these 4 survive on the streets, no home, no shelter, just a constant need to get money to get high, a circle of hell with no end in sight.
Brutal existence.
But fascinating to watch.
The rest of the flick
The film itself cuts back and forth between the two couples. For the sake of clarity, I’ll tackle each couple separately instead of going chronologically through the film itself. Let’s start with Matt and Tracy as they are already making their presence felt in the 1ST 5.
Unlike Michelle and Sebastian, these two seem to actually be attracted to each other, and in love, as they show affection to each other, however crudely, throughout the picture. Which is why it is interesting later to see that one of the ways this couple gets money is for Matt to whore himself out to gay guys. And it’s so funny, cause the dudes pay him for the honor of sucking HIS dick. It’s not like they hire him to give them a blowjob, no, they hire him so they can give him a blowjob, and make him cum, or maybe not.
It's shocking when we see Matt, his pants around his ankles, getting his dick sucked and his balls fondled by some old bald dude with a moustache, which is why this is my Favorite Shot in the whole flick. When you see Matt’s face, looking at the old man, Al, as he sucks his dick, it’s like he’s zoning out. Matt isn’t gay, but he is a hustler, and if he needs to do gay shit like let dudes suck his dick, so be it.
As I alluded to above, it’s not clear if Matt cums in this guy’s mouth or not, as he just abruptly ends the blowjob at one point by saying “That’s good. I said that’s good!” Almost angry that Al doesn’t stop the blowjob quick enough. It’s weird. It’s so unsettling, this silent scene of an old man blowing a guy in his 20’s.
These images are seared into my brain. Powerful shit, seeing raw and up close what the addiction compels these people to do.
It’s interesting to think of it from Tracy’s perspective. Here she is with her man, and he has to go off and get his dick sucked by God knows who, and then she gets fucked by that same dick that was in some dude’s mouth. These people act like literal demons, bathing in excrement, total bottom feeders, and all because of the drugs.
Yes, I will show this documentary to my kids when they’re in high school. Scare these motherfuckers straight!
Hopefully…
Matt gives Al a kiss goodbye, on the lips, then thanks someone off camera, a guy named Scott, who the camera pans to and it’s some skinny AIDS looking motherfucker lying on some scummy mattress, smoking a cigarette. I mean, just check out this apartment! Can you believe people live like this? Holy shit. Unreal.
There’s many scenes of Matt and Tracy shooting up, and smoking crack. They never get old. Neither does their running commentary for the cameras, revealing in intricate detail how their drug addled minds work, the rationalizations and excuses. What’s notable with both these couples is that they are not stupid. Ok, maybe Sebastian is a bit dim, but the other three don’t seem dumb. They seem captured. Much like Kathleen in The Addiction. Incredible stuff.
At some point, Tracy gets locked up for assault. In true reality show style, the cameras just so happen to miss this alleged assault. Not only that, no explanation is ever given, neither by Tracy nor Matt, about the assault, no details, or even what “assault” could mean in this context. Either way, she got pinched and gets locked up for a few weeks. Notable that the cameras were allowed inside the jail, to see Tracy in her jumpsuit, dreaming of when she’ll be back on the outside with Matt.
While the drugs hold primacy in their lives, the love they have for each other seems to be just as strong. It’s kind of sweet, actually.
Matt, hopeless romantic that he is, decides he needs to write Tracy a letter while she’s in jail. Having no paper, he utilizes a used brown paper bag, carefully rips it so it is flat and wide. Looks almost like a parchment he’s writing some ye olde tyme proclamation on. It’s fantastic.
Some other homeless junkie comes over as Matt writes and hovers over as the letter is written. This stranger is impressed. “That’s good shit.” Matt reads us the letter and again it is striking how thoughtful he is. He does not sound like a dummy, at all. Despite missing teeth and looking like hammered shit 100% of the time, he still has a mind.
At one point, he relates an interesting story that he was in an accident when he was 12, which wiped his entire memory, meaning he can only remember from after that accident on. Not 10 minutes later, he tells us a story of him robbing tourists when he was 11. How does he remember?
Classic unreliable narrator.
Matt also features in my Favorite Scene in the whole movie. Tracy is in jail. Matt is on his own. He breaks into an apartment building and goes into the elevator to shoot some dope. Only one problem. He lost the fucking baggy of heroin! Can’t find it. Searches his whole body for it as his panic slowly increases, his face contorting, baring his missing teeth. A garish sight seeing this desperate man get even more desperate.
Once he thoroughly searches all his possessions for naught, he exits the building, tries to retrace his steps in the slim hopes of maybe finding where the baggy fell out of his pocket. And miraculously enough, he finds it on the sidewalk, and immediately the relief washes over him, he does a little dance, and screams out to a stranger who just stops and stares at him from afar. It’s fucking amazing.
Matt and Tracy’s trip to his mother’s house in some cracked out part of New Jersey is fantastic, as Matt narrates his childhood and all the trouble he got into. His mother looks like absolute white trash, with that white trash haircut, you know what I’m talking about. She tells the camera Tracy is a bad influence on Matt. Classic enabler. Nothing the mother did, nothing about how Matt grew up, no, it’s this broad he met AFTER he was already a thieving, lying addict.
One need not look far to see the proximate causes of these poor souls’ downfalls.
Same with Tracy’s father. Without his constant cash infusions (which aren’t even enough as evidenced by Matt having to get blown by Al), she’d be done. In the early part of the film, he is merely an unseen benefactor that wires them money. It’s not until late in the film that he reveals himself, and these scenes are some of the best things in the film.
The father still treats Tracy like she’s 10. He buys her videogames because she played them when she was a kid and it was “good for her.” Can you even believe this shit?!? Fucking mind boggling. Tracy acts like she’s not using anymore, and says she needs videogames and the mountains of DVDs because of how much time you have on your hands when you don’t get high. I love the way she says this line. Iconic.
And not wrong.
In the immediate aftermath of not using, you have a biologically derived inability to feel pleasure. Your mind needs to time to rewire itself and the pleasure mechanisms buried deep within. It’s why relapse is so easy. You’re fucking bored!
Turns out the old man has rented an apartment for them. Looks like an attached house. Not sure where. First thing Matt and Tracy do upon entering their new place, which is to be the start of a new life, is get high. It’s amazing. Just immediately smoke some fucking crack. Inside. Don’t even blow it out the window. You wonder how long they will be able to keep this house in functioning order, though with Daddy’s money, it should be easy.
I like the story of when Matt first met Tracy, where she was known in junkie circles, derisively, as Daddy’s little rich girl, which she obviously is, “rich” being quite relative in this case. For people hell bent on making money so they can score dope, it seems weird to hold Tracy in low regard for having easy access to cash. And maybe Matt did hook up with her because of the dough, hard to say definitively, but there is clear and true love for each other. It radiates off the screen.
The tour of their new apartment is legendary, from all the DVDs and videogames stacked up against the walls, to closet after closet full of fucking SWEATERS! That’s my Favorite Line in the whole movie, the way Matt says “SWEAT-UHS!” Seriously, what the fuck is up with all the Cosby sweaters? Mountains and bags of sweaters.
In an earlier scene, Tracy’s old man had a trunk full of jackets he offered for them to pick one each. I assume the father works in the garment industry and just has access to tons of shit as a result. Makes no sense otherwise. Who the fuck has entire closets full of shitty sweaters? It’s hilarious.
And that’s the last we see of them. They got the apartment, they’re off the street, and hopefully they can return to some sort of normal life, though for them, what the fuck would that even look like?
The other couple, Michelle and Sebastian, are just as committed to one another as Matt and Tracy, but there’s zero affection, zero romantic gestures, zero love. Their relationship, as it were, seems solely transactional. There’s no hint these two ever have sex. As I said earlier, they feel more like a mother and son, which is interesting cause we see Michelle’s actual adult son at one point, and he’s obviously fucked up from having this junkie for a mother.
Michelle and Sebastian have similarities and key differences in how they get money to secure drugs. Like Matt, Sebastian offers himself to gay men for them to blow him. This leads to one of the funniest scenes in the whole movie when Sebastian goes up to the guy’s apartment to get blown, and all we hear is the audio, which is in all likelihood dubbed for the john’s side. They do this later on as well, which we’ll get to.
So, Sebastian meets this guy on the street, confirms he likes guys who are uncircumcised (oof), and goes to his apartment. The dialogue here is next level.
“You’ve got a beautiful dick.
So, you got any cum in those balls?
Tastes good!”
Dying.
We hear Sebastian getting the money from the guy, who asks “You’re not buying drugs with this, are you?” Sebastian says no and lets the guy know he’ll see him next week. Amazing. Just a regular appointment to get your dick sucked. Apparently, there’s this whole subculture of gay dudes who like sucking off straight dudes.
Fascinating.
But Michelle’s hustle is VERY different from Tracy’s. She has no rich daddy. She’s got to make her money the old fashioned way, like tricking a guy into thinking he’s paying to have sex with her (can you imagine?), only to lie and say she’s a cop and rob the fucking guy. Or sometimes she looks in the trash outside a supermarket, finds a receipt with a big ticket item on it, like say a giant tub of detergent, goes in the store, finds the detergent, then goes to the counter and returns the detergent for money. Pretty slick hustle, if you ask me. But it’s not enough for them. It’s chickenshit. Making 20 bucks here, 20 bucks there, ain’t gonna cut it.
Which is why Michelle’s fake prostitute/cop bit is the real money maker.
Once she gets in the guy’s car and negotiates the price for sex, he hands some dough over, and she immediately says “you just handed your money to an undercover officer,” trying to scare the shit out of these dudes. And it fucking works! She has some stupid mini badge and a pair of handcuffs, and she gets these guys to give her all the money they have on them. No one has cash these days, so this hustle would never work in 2025, but back in 2005? This is another very slick hustle.
Not so slick? The fucking dubbing for these johns. It’s quite frankly hilarious, but nearly derails the whole picture with how bad the actors they got to dub the real lines are.
One guy they dub is some black dude, which isn’t that bad. Obviously dubbed, but the voice actor is solid. Can’t say the same for another guy, who Michelle picks up in the daytime, who goes on and on about how stupid he was to do this. It’s so bad, but apparently this is the actual dialogue, just performed by someone else. Whoever the voice actor is… awful. Absurd in a bad way.
Then there’s a third guy who gets so scared he hops out of his car and tries to run, but is stopped by Sebastian. It’s a wild sequence. These people lead dangerous lives, and do very dangerous things to feed their habit. Any one of these johns could have a weapon or really fuck Michelle up somehow. It’s nuts.
As is Michelle, who does nothing but hector Sebastian the whole movie. All she does is nag, nag, nag. At least Matt and Tracy have a certain joie d’ vivre, one cannot say the same for Sebastian and Michelle, who seem dour and depressed. Sebastian seems nice, he’s a follower, never raises his voice, his drug stupor keeping him calm and edgeless.
Michelle is a ball of stress, from bent needles driving her insane, to Sebastian not being where’s he’s supposed to, to imploring Sebastian to get her bag in one wild sequence that has them fighting each other on the street in broad daylight!
Sebastian tosses Michelle’s bag in the street, and she flips out, she’s so angry, but instead of just getting her bag, she follows after Sebastian, asking him to get her bag! She’s so distraught, so beside herself, so frustrated, but she won’t go get her bag. The chaotic lives these people lead, with their chaotic minds, scrambled by years of drug use, is a sight to behold.
Eventually, Sebastian, having had enough of Michelle’s shit, just disappears, despite both of them professing a desire to go to rehab to get clean.
They mean it and they don’t mean it.
Michelle has to go to Westchester, NY to meet her adult son so she can get her ID, apparently the son keeps a purse of hers with all her important documents. She struggles to make it up there on the railroad, and struggles to make it back. Without the ID she can’t get admitted to rehab. But once back in the city, she can’t find Sebastian, despite going to all the usual spots.
He’s disappeared, leaving her alone, cold and confused. She checks into rehab but is then out after a day or two, getting high again. She just went to rehab for a warm bed, nothing more.
Michelle has a remarkable moment of clarity near the end, when she relates a story from her childhood. She was a little girl walking through Grand Central and saw the homeless junkies, wondered how could they sleep there, how could they not have a bed and a home, and now she is the very person she saw as a child. That’s her reality now.
It’s an incredible moment, and the film ends on this thought, as we cut to Michelle, alone, passed out on the subway.
Chilling.
This doc is singular, both for its raw style as well as the subjects themselves. Matt and Tracy and Michelle and Sebastian MAKE this film. I hate to use the word “casting,” but fuck it, the casting for this doc is incredible. Real lightning strike finding these two couples, whose fates are similar, intertwined, yet wholly and objectively worlds apart. Amazing work by the crew.
Nothing like this film has existed before, or after.
And it never shall.
The One Sheet
Seeing as this was a “TV” movie on HBO, it didn’t really have a one sheet in the classic sense of the word. More a promo than anything else. I like this black and white image of one of the junkies in the flick, probably Sebastian, hard to tell who from this angle, shooting some junk into their arm.
The font for the title isn’t great, but leagues better than the font in the actual doc.
And then a simple “HBO” beneath it. Nothing great, but it isn’t bad.
And that does it for Dope Sick Love. It is currently streaming on HBO if you don’t want to use my janky link from above.
Did you just hear me, you can watch this shit, right now, and have your life changed forever.
What are you waiting for?
See you in two beautiful dicks…