Dallas Buyers Club a 2013 American biographical drama film written by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée.

The film tells the story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a cowboy diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-1980s, a time when both the etiology and the treatment of HIV/AIDS are poorly understood and its sufferers subject to stigmatization.

As part of an ongoing experimental AIDS treatment movement, Woodroof smuggles unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas to treat his symptoms.

Here, he distributes them to fellow people with AIDS by establishing the "Dallas Buyers Club", all the while facing opposition from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Two fictional supporting characters, Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner), and Rayon (Jared Leto), were composite roles created from interviews with transgender AIDS patients, activists, and doctors.

After Rayon's death, Woodroof begins to show more compassion toward LGBT members of the club, and making money becomes less of a concern; his priority becomes providing the drugs as peptide T gets increasingly challenging to acquire.

The film is based on the real life of Ron Woodroof, a patient of HIV and AIDS, who was the subject of a lengthy 1992 article in The Dallas Morning News written by journalist and author Bill Minutaglio.

[23] In 2001, after one year of working on the script, they sold it to producer Robbie Brenner, who then set Marc Forster to direct the film for Universal Pictures, but left due to some personal delays.

[24] In June 2008, Craig Gillespie and Ryan Gosling were in talks to join the film, which was to be produced by David Bushell and Marc Abraham for Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment.

[25] Chase Palmer was writing the script that time around, and screenwriters Guillermo Arriaga and Stephen Belber had reportedly also written the subsequent drafts for the film.

[25] In 2009, producer Robbie Brenner got involved again and rejected all the rewrites of the script, and the original version by Borten and Wallack was sent to actor Matthew McConaughey to see if the Texas native would be interested in playing the role.

[29] On October 3, 2012, it was announced that Swank had dropped out of the film and that Gael García Bernal was in talks to play an HIV patient who meets Woodroof in the hospital and helps him in the club.

[37] Jennifer Garner has stated that the film was shot very quickly over just 25 days and has remarked that McConaughey "gave an even wilder performance in takes that didn't appear onscreen".

"[39] Jared Leto, who played Rayon, an AIDS patient and trans woman with a drug problem, refused to break character for the whole 25 days of shooting.

[42] The soundtrack album featured various artists, include Leto's band Thirty Seconds to Mars, Tegan and Sara, Awolnation, The Naked and Famous, T. Rex, My Morning Jacket, Fitz and the Tantrums, Blondfire, Neon Trees, Cold War Kids, Capital Cities, The Airborne Toxic Event, and more.

The website's consensus reads: "Dallas Buyers Club rests squarely on Matthew McConaughey's scrawny shoulders, and he carries the burden gracefully with what might be a career-best performance.

[62] Richard Corliss of Time considered McConaughey's portrayal to be a "bold, drastic and utterly persuasive inhabiting of a doomed fighter", remarking that "if the camera occasionally suffers a fashionable case of the jitters, the movie transcends its agitated verismo to impart dramatic and behavioral truth".

"[64] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Dallas Buyers Club" takes audiences back to the worst of the AIDS crisis, where the disease was a death sentence, and the public's terror and hostility were at its height.

"[70] Bob Mondello criticized the film's character for NPR in these words: "Dallas Buyers Club is just about a selfish boor who arguably gets a pass in terms of posterity, because while looking out for No.

"[71] Dana Stevens of Slate praised McConaughey's performance, highlighting that the movie "traffics in deep hindbrain emotions: fear and rage and lust and, above all, the pure animal drive to go on living.

"[72] A. O. Scott reviewed the film for The New York Times and said, "Matthew McConaughey brings a jolt of unpredictable energy to Dallas Buyers Club, an affecting if conventional real-life story of medical activism.

"[78] Film critic Betsy Sharkey reviewed for the Los Angeles Times, "[McConaughey and Leto] elevate the movie beyond ordinary biography or overplayed tragedy, and give Oscar-worthy performances in the process."

"[79] Peter Debruge of Variety said, "Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto give terrific performances in this riveting and surprisingly relatable true story.

"[80] Leto's portrayal of Rayon, a drug-addicted trans woman with AIDS who befriends McConaughey's character Ron Woodroof, received critical acclaim.

"[40] Time's Richard Corliss noted, "Leto captures the sweet intensity and almost saintly good humor of a glamorous, poignant and downright divoon creature — a blithe Camille who may surrender her health but never her panache.

[94] The characters of Rayon and Dr. Eve Saks were fictional; the writers had interviewed transgender AIDS patients, activists, and doctors for the film and combined these stories to create the two composite supporting roles.

Other people who knew him said that he did not harbor anti-gay sentiments; the real Woodroof was openly bisexual and assumed he had contracted HIV from sexual encounters with men.

"[100] Woodroof frequently declares that the drug AZT (azidothymidine) is ineffective and counter-productive, yet years later it is still prescribed to patients with AIDS, albeit at a much lower dose (as mentioned in the epilogue).

[102] Journalist David France, who directed the documentary How to Survive a Plague, suggested that AZT was actually "the first element of a cocktail of drugs that ended the era of AIDS-as-death sentence".

By the mid-1990s, David Ho and other researchers found AZT was quite effective when used in conjunction with two other anti-virals, which decreased the chances of virus developing resistance to any one drug.