Trainspotting

Iggy, Underworld, and a Scottish comedown

Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life starts before the film has named Edinburgh. Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, released in Britain in February 1996, opens fast: Ewan McGregor as Renton, feet on a street, a monologue that lists ordinary life in order to refuse it. John Hodge’s script, drawn from Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel, does not pause to explain heroin. There is no punchline waiting, and the camera still runs.

Much of the city on screen is Glasgow standing in for Leith. The cheat does not matter. What matters is the gang, filmed as a group that shifts from scene to scene. Ewen Bremner’s Spud apologizes with his posture as much as with the line. Jonny Lee Miller’s Sick Boy uses charm as a tactic. Robert Carlyle’s Begbie needs no drugs to be the most dangerous man in the room. Kelly Macdonald’s Diane arrives later and already sees where this group is headed. Boyle cuts fast and precise, like a pop single, from a moment when British guitar music was back and the morning after was part of the story.

The soundtrack does as much directing as the camera. Lou Reed’s Perfect Day plays over an overdose and makes the horror look calm. Blur, Pulp, New Order’s Temptation, Brian Eno, Leftfield: Britpop and what sat beside it are placed inside the scenes, not dropped in like a commercial break. Then the credits, and Underworld’s Born Slippy .NUXX, a track that was not written for this film and became the sound people kept from it anyway. For a year that kick drum brought the film straight back: a floor, a choice, a lie told fast. Iggy Pop opens the film. Underworld closes it. Between those two cues, the songs do narrative work ordinary dialogue could not.

The film is more specific than the pitch of a Scottish drug story. Friendship here is a bad habit that still shows up on time. The way out is a theft dressed as self-rescue. The jokes keep people at a distance. The pop songs keep the pace up. Boyle and Hodge never add a speech that would improve anybody. Renton gets out by stealing, which the film neither blesses nor hides. Welsh’s book was a chorus of dialects. The movie stays with one pair of eyes and still lets the others shove into the frame.