44. Light Sleeper (1992)

Show Notes

This week on the Full Cast And Crew Podcast we cruise the rain-slicked early 90's NYC streets and track down Paul Schrader's (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, American Gigolo) 1992 film 'Light Sleeper'. Fittingly, we're releasing this one at 2:43am on a Thursday morning, with our ears still ringing from the sound system at Area and our noses numbed with bad decisions.

A Manhattan drug dealer with a wealthy clientele, John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) reevaluates both his trade and his life after discovering that his supplier, Ann (Susan Sarandon), is planning on quitting the business. When John runs into his old flame Marianne (Dana Delany), he sees reconnecting with her as a way to change for the better, but she is reluctant to rekindle the romance. Complicating John's life further is a series of drug-related murders that has the police pegging him as a suspect.

Schrader called 'Light Sleeper' the last of his "Man In A Room' movies, along with Taxi Driver and American Gigolo; movies about isolated, alienated men occupying their single-room apartments and going slowly crazy with the dawning awareness of the dissatisfaction and ennui they are feeling.  Despite that wrist-slitting description, 'Light Sleeper' features some pitch-perfect performances from Willem Dafoe, Sarandon, David Clennon, Victor Garber, Delaney, Mary Beth Hurt, Jane Adams, a young Sam Rockwell, and David Spade as "theological cokehead".  

'Light Sleeper' is like transporting yourself back to NYC in the late 80's and early 90's.  The restaurants, the coke, the bullshit clothes.  But all that is viewed, almost in real time, with an acerbic, probing eye that lets no one off the hook.  Featuring a soundtrack from The Call's Michael Been (1983's MTV-staple 'The Walls Came Down'), 'Light Sleeper' might not be a movie you're familiar with unless you came of age in the movie theaters of the 80's and 90's, but it's a perfect period piece and prescient about the downfalls and lies at the center of a life among "the beautiful people", with a sense of possible redemption at the end in the most unexpected of places.

More about Light Sleeper here. 

Paul Schrader's IMDB page here.

Light Sleeper Full Cast & Crew page here

Cinematographer Ed Lachman's IMDB page here

Full Cast And Crew Podcast page here.