Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy - Documentary

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‘Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy’ Review: A Documentary About What Made a New Hollywood Classic Indelible

Nancy Buirski's rapt documentary channels how "Midnight Cowboy" channeled the world around it. - By Owen Gleiberman



A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives.

Its triumph at the Oscars was the most powerful testament yet to the film industry’s acceptance of the rise of the New Hollywood, though the fact that John Wayne, at the same ceremony, won best actor for “True Grit” revealed that the industry was still looking in two directions at once. Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn was the real (fake) cowboy; Voight’s Joe Buck was the fake (real) cowboy. In 1969, they represented the yin and yang of what movies, and life, could be. As “Desperate Souls, Dark City” so eloquently captures, they were one dream giving way to another.

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