Part of Music City Mondays
Danny Boyle directs this adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel about a group of young Edinburgh dope fiends on the make. Ewan McGregor stars as Mark Renton, the most reflective member of a group that also includes the compulsive womanizer, Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), and the hapless Spud (Ewen Bremner). Renton, Spud and Sick Boy’s issues with drugs alternatively irritate and amuse their friend, Begbie (Robert Carlyle) — a periodic psychopath whose outbursts of violence are one of the many factors that convince Renton to leave for London in the hope of starting a new life. Renton enjoys some success remolding himself as an estate agent in the English capital, but it isn’t long before his Edinburgh friends catch up with him. Begbie and company need the money Renton has saved from his job to finance the drug deal that could make them all rich.
TRAINSPOTTING boasts a massive soundtrack featuring music by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, New Order, Brian Eno, Blondie and more.
“Exuberant and pitiless, profane yet eloquent, flush with the ability to create laughter out of unspeakable situations, TRAINSPOTTING is a drop-dead look at a dead-end lifestyle that has all the strength of its considerable contradictions.” —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times “In TRAINSPOTTING, Danny Boyle works in a fever-dream style derived, in equal measure, from the street operas of Martin Scorsese and the adrenaline aesthetic of music videos…. Like Scorsese and Tarantino, Boyle uses pop songs as rhapsodic mood enhancers, though in his own ravey-hypnotic style.” —Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (1996)
