John (Willem Dafoe) doesn’t have much direction in life – he’s in the throes of middle-age, and all he’s known as been drugs. He used to be an addict, but has now gotten clean, but still does work as a dealer and delivery man for Ann (Susan Sarandon), his glamorous supplier, who services the elite of Manhattan, and has always been a good friend and employer to the aimless John. However, she decides that she is quitting the drug trade, and instead going straight, starting her own brand of cosmetics, in the hopes that it’ll not only be a more lucrative career but also get her out of the volatile world of dealing drugs. John, however, is unable to come to terms with the fact that his own trade may be coming to an end and refuses to sink to the depths of the more low-level dealers he actively avoids. He encounters Marianne (Dana Delaney), his ex-girlfriend, with whom he used to have a very dangerous drug addiction that nearly destroyed both of their lives. She isn’t pleased that a spectre from her past has manifested again, especially since her mother is dying, and the last thing she wants is to be pressured to be around a man who defines a very dark part of her life. However, John is very persuasive, and his feelings for Marianne have not abated in all these years – he actively pursues her, but even after seeming to win her back, John sees that her trauma is far too much for her to handle, and she sinks back into addiction, which only motivates him to find a way out of this trade. He aspires to be in the music business, but he is too lost in a world he understands to navigate it, and with the fear of being caught becoming increasingly a reality (since John has been seen as a possible suspect in a recent drug-related murder), he struggles to see a way out, even if he’s willing to go to any lengths necessary to ensure that he doesn’t pay the consequences, even though he’s willing to accept them when they’re inevitably levelled against him.

Paul Schrader is known for making films primarily centred on lonely people, to the point where films like Taxi Driver, First Reformed and American Gigolo essentially define him as a writer and filmmaker. One of his less-heralded works is Light Sleeper, one of the fundamental entries into this canon of men driven to act out in violent and irrational ways as a result of their own crushing anxieties and personal quandaries, often driven by a profound sense of isolation. Undeniably not his most effective work, especially since there are some aspects of the film that do beg for additional tinkering that could’ve improved it substantially, Light Sleeper is a powerful crime drama that takes the viewer on a dark and deceptive odyssey into the world of high society drug dealing, channelling the machinations of this side of the industry through the perspective of a man who simultaneously feels at ease in this profession while wanting desperately to get out of it, recognizing both the comfort of such a simple career, but being fully aware of the dangers that come with it. There are a lot of powerful ideas underpinning Light Sleeper, which often feels like one of the director’s most experimental works (at least for the period in which he had made it, since he was yet to enter into his era of Adam Resurrected and Dog Eat Dog, which are both fascinating films, but fundamentally less-successful than this), but one that still never deviates from his most notable qualities as a filmmaker, namely his attention to the internal struggles of a man fighting for survival, and the situating of the events in a rugged, unforgiving version of a world that is recognizable to us, but still so impenetrably difficult to relate to, since Schrader shows us a side of it that many of us mercifully don’t have much first-hand experience in. Needless to see, Light Sleeper is a tremendously effective work, whether we look at it from the perspective of what the director was aiming to say, or the ways in which he conveyed these concepts, both of which carry immense merit in their own way.

At the centre of Light Sleeper is Willem Dafoe, who had gradually started assimilating into his position as one of the preeminent character actors of his generation. This was the start of a long and dedicated creative partnership between the actor and Schrader (as a director, since he previously wrote The Last Temptation of Christ), which isn’t difficult to comprehend – I’d expect any actor given a role as interesting as John LeTour would be indebted in some way to the person who wrote it. This is one of Dafoe’s most underpraised performances, an early work that positioned him in the leading role, and gave him the chance to play one of his most complex characters to date. The film is anchored almost entirely by Dafoe, who possesses both the street-smart charisma to play the part of a hustling drug dealer, but also the inner complexity to take on the more intimate nuances of the character. John is a man struggling to find his place in the world – he’s too old to feasibly start an entirely new career, especially since he’s aspiring to enter into the music industry, but far too young to fade into obscurity. His life is one filled with mystery, and very few actors can pull off such a deft blend of enigmatic charm and inner turmoil quite like Dafoe, who shows the right amount of restraint, never being too subdued, but also avoiding excess as much as possible. He’s contrasted wonderfully by Susan Sarandon, also giving one of her most underrated performances as the empress of a drug kingdom that has decided to recalibrate her attention to the more honest (but surprisingly more cutthroat) world of cosmetics. Dafoe and Sarandon play off each other so well, with their chemistry being absolutely incredible, each one occupying these distinct roles with an intensity that makes you genuinely believe in them. It’s always a wonderful experience to see two amazing performers at their peak working across from each other, and its almost worth the price of admission of Light Sleeper alone to see them together.

Any reason to see two great actors challenge themselves by playing such interesting roles that are departures from the kinds of characters they normally tend to portray is always something worth seeking out – and Schrader, despite some of his flaws as a filmmaker, truly knows how to write compelling characters. John LeTour is one of his finest creations – a man driven to the brink of insanity not by any external factors, but rather his own inability to reconcile the past with the present. He’s a good man in a despicable trade, and the only reason he hasn’t left it behind is because he is too weak to take the risk of finding something else, for fears of not being good at it. He is weighed down by his intense insomnia, which only worsens when it compounds with anxiety extracted from his encounters with some figures from his past. Light Sleeper is not a typical crime drama – one of Schrader’s most significant talents is how he positions the audience to expect one kind of story, and delivers something slightly different, not necessarily misleading us, but rather focusing on a different side of the genre. This is a remarkably intelligent character study about an individual working through his own inner demons – the fact that he is a drug dealer (or as referred to in the film, a “D.D”, an almost euphemistic refusal to define himself by his choice of career) is secondary, especially when it’s clear that he is trying to go straight. Schrader tells a haunting story of a man lost in a vicious world, and while he may not paint John or the drug trade in a particularly sympathetic light (and quite rightly has the characters pay the consequences), he’s not interested in the mechanics, but rather the more human side of it all, which creates quite an enduring film that deserves a lot more attention for how the director masters the oscillation between dialogue-driven character work and more ambitious portrayals of the crime narrative, which are woven together in unexpectedly profound ways, resulting in quite a unique and subversive blend of drama and crime thriller that is far more intelligent and meaningful than we’d expect from the central premise.

More than anything else, Schrader’s films are simple in concept and effective in execution – he’s an artist who cares more about telling an interesting story than he does create a perfect film, which has often meant that his long career has had its fair share of failures, but also allowed it to hit unprecedented peaks. Light Sleeper isn’t his best work, as either a writer or director, but it is one of his more under-praised, and deserves to be seen as one of his more interesting pieces, not only for how he manages to look into the world of the drug trade in a way that seems entirely original, but also for his broader insights into the human condition. His brand may be films about lonely men struggling to fit into the contemporary world that doesn’t have much place for them, but Light Sleeper goes beyond this – its a hauntingly beautiful manifesto to the resilience embedded in even the most broken of individuals. The director walks a narrow tightrope between humanizing a character who has chosen a life of crime, and showing his inner struggle in accepting that this is essentially his place in the world, and that nothing can change the fact that he may have been successful, but he contributed to a horribly violent faction of the world – we’re not driven to feel sympathy for John, but rather come to know his struggle and identify with his own sense of unbelonging and aimlessness that govern his insecurities and keep him stagnant. Insightful, heartbreaking and often quite complex, Light Sleeper is a fascinating film – how Schrader manages to create something so unexpectedly moving, where there are some genuinely tender moments scattered throughout, is quite an achievement, and warrants giving this film another glance, since there’s a lot of value here that is often overlooked in discussions of the director’s work, of which this is one of the more interesting experiments that work out tremendously well, and leaves us with a complex, thought-provoking modern odyssey about one man’s journey to redefine his life and choices, without losing himself entirely along the way.