Junk-time runs on a needle-to-know basis (ever wondered why the fuckers can’t keep their dates straight?); Friend says when you’re not high you’re horny, and when you’re not horny everything’s expendable. But nine years later and Boyle’s grit-licked misshapes are right where we left ‘em, clouded in heroin smoke, sadhappy Brit-pop on loop.

In fact, they’re probably better off, now that all the “style over substance”-backlash backlash has finally gathered some momentum. Style here is nothing more (or less) than a machine, plugged into the twin rushes of the junkie mind: Pistons flex ecstatically to the beat of “Lust for Life,” yet can turn back on themselves just as easily. And Boyle is clearly aware of its limitations. His Scotland predates the “glittering shithole” of postmodernism – it’s just a regular shithole, built on a cultural cross-pollination that leaves Renton and company with no other choice but to defile history’s shallow grave: Sick Boy spins Sean Connery trivia into counterweight intellectual-posturing; Travis Bickle is imported onto an acidhouse dancefloor, prefiguring Begby’s outbursts; Diane hounds Renton for listening to “Ziggy [sic] Pop,” while Warhol poster-art outs her own balding, art-school-ready leanings. In other words, a perfect closed-circuited conductor for the film’s punkish exuberance. Even if moralism does win out in the end, its actual presence amounts to little more than lipstick traces on nihilism’s collar; and when Renton throws in the towel for what’s suppposedly the last time – “chooses life” –, the apathy persists, foregoing the kind of whitewashing that packs an entire AA seminar into the eleventh hour. The drugs don’t work, yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything else does.—David Levinson

» Danny Boyle | UK | 1996