While it missed a golden opportunity to be called "Cocaingel," Michael Tully's directorial debut Cocaine Angel is a low-key, observant drama showing a couple days in the life of a helpless cocaine junkie, as he lumbers from friends' drug-infested lofts, to liquor stores, to the polluted streets to fulfill his accursed habit. The junkie is Scott (the film's writer Damian Lahey), who resides in Jacksonville, Florida, more concerned about where his next fix is going to come from rather than caring for his daughter or trying to find work. He barely has a couple bucks in his wallet, which are eventually spent on a liquor store's cheapest pint of whiskey, and, throughout the course of the film, whether it be through Tully's directorial aesthetics or through the character's speech and mannerisms, we begin to see the cocaine consumer our anti-hero and witness the demise of a character we questioned ever rose in the first place.
Tully chooses to capture Cocaine Angel in a gritty, ugly style, which is only germane to the subject matter all the more. The film is dark, often low-lit but not indistinguishable, and visually murky in its cinematography (done by the likes of Shawn Lewallen). Despite its visually ugly qualities, there is a beauty in the unabashed naturalism in the way the film is photographed, never ceasing to show the character and his addiction in the reprehensible light they both deserve to be shown in. The film's aesthetic is greatly reminiscent of a home movie, only this is a home movie virtually no one would want to reflect on.
Most importantly, however, is that Cocaine Angel gets details right above everything. It is the barrage of quiet, subtle little details, like the dirtiness of the cup Scott drinks out of, the dreadlocks and the unkempt look boasted by "Hurricane Mike" (Richard Dawson), the film's main drug dealer, and the conversations had between Scott, Hurricane Mike, and Mary (Kelly Forester), another "friend" of Scott's.
Tully holds nothing back in his focus of a loner drug dealer, and at just seventy-two minutes long, the thin but competently made Cocaine Angel races past, but not in a sense that it's in one ear and out the other. This is a film that, for some, will linger, like a high or a pint of Early Times, with its effect on a viewer ranging from a passing glance to one that will lurk in ones mind for days to come. Consider me the latter, as I now recall the famous lines of Johnny Cash, "lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be."
Starring: Damian Lahey, Kelly Forester, and Richard Dawson. Directed by: Michael Tully.
