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Less Than Zero

Catalog Number
1649
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Less Than Zero (1987)

Additional Information

Additional Information
In Beverly Hills, you can have anything your heart desires. You just can't have it the way it used to be.

It only looks like the good life.


This drama about affluent Los Angeles teens is taken from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Clay (Andrew McCarthy) is a college freshman who returns home during Christmas break. Clay's old flame Blair (Jamie Gertz) is now more interested in her new beau Julian (Robert Downey, Jr.), the fun-loving party boy with a penchant for drugs. While Clay tries to rekindle a thing with Blair, Julian becomes addicted to cocaine and starts freebasing. Julian's friends try halfheartedly to intervene, with no success. Soon he is so far in debt to drug dealer Rip (James Spader) that Julian becomes a male prostitute, whoring for enough money for his next fix. Michael Bowen co-stars with Tony Bill and Nicholas Pryor in this trip into the seamy world of darkness in sunny California.


Less Than Zero is a 1987 American drama film very loosely based on Bret Easton Ellis' novel of the same name. The film stars Andrew McCarthy as Clay, a college freshman returning home for Christmas to spend time with his ex-girlfriend Blair (Jami Gertz) and his friend Julian (Robert Downey, Jr.), who is also a drug addict. The film presents a look at the culture of wealthy, decadent youth in Los Angeles.

Less Than Zero received mixed reviews among critics. Ellis hated the film initially but his view of it later softened. He insists that the film bears no resemblance to his novel and felt that it was miscast with the exceptions of Downey and James Spader.

The film received mixed reviews from critics; film historian Leonard Maltin gave it two-out-of-four stars: "Bret Ellis' novel is sanitized into pointlessness, although an entirely faithful adaptation would have surely turned everyone off; try to imagine this picture with Eddie Bracken, Veronica Lake and Sonny Tufts." Maltin despised the movie version of the faithfully adapted Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction (film), which he gave a BOMB rating to.

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave it a score of 54% based on a weighted average of 24 reviews.[6] In the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Mr. Downey gives a performance that is desperately moving, with the kind of emotion that comes as a real surprise in these surroundings."[7] Rita Kempley, in her review for the Washington Post, called the film, "noodle-headed and faint-hearted, a shallow swipe at a serious problem, with a happily-ever-after ending yet."[8] In Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "Imagine Antonioni making a high-school public-service movie and you'll have an inkling of the movie's high-toned silliness."[9] In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave Less Than Zero a four-star review, noting that the "movie knows cocaine inside out and paints a portrait of drug addiction that is all the more harrowing because it takes place in the Beverly Hills fast lane...The movie's three central performances are flawless...[Robert Downey, Jr's] acting here is so real, so subtle and so observant that it's scary...The whole movie looks brilliantly superficial, and so Downey's predicament is all the more poignant: He is surrounded by all of this, he is in it and of it, and yet he cannot have it".[10] New York magazine's David Denby wrote, "In many ways, Less than Zero is a cynical, manipulative job. Yet, the movie has something great in it, something that could legitimately move teenagers (or anyone else): Robert Downey Jr. as the disintegrating Julian, a performance in which beautiful exuberance gives way horrifying to a sudden, startled sadness".[11]

Upon its initial release, Ellis hated the film. While promoting the book Lunar Park he said he has gotten very "sentimental" about it[12] and has "really warmed up to it now. I've accepted it".[13] He admits that the film bears no resemblance to his novel but that it captured, "a certain youth culture during that decade that no other movie caught", and felt that it was miscast with the exceptions of Downey and Spader.[12] Furthermore he has said, "I think that movie is gorgeous, and the performances that I thought were shaky seem much better now. Like, Jami Gertz seems much better to me now than she did 20 years ago. It’s something I can watch".[14] The film was voted as the 22nd best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors with two criteria: "The movie had to communicate some inherent truth about the L.A. experience, and only one film per director was allowed on the list".[15]

Release Date: November 6, 1987


Distrib: 20th Century Fox

Boxoffice: $12,396,383 2014: $26,473,100

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