Midnight Cowboy is a gritty, performance-enlivening, unyielding piece about a wannabe cowboy experiencing the perverse and grotesque underbelly of metropolitan life in New York City. Determined to live as a hustler in NYC, young stud Joe Buck (Jon Voight) leaves his rural working Texas town searching for a better life. On his bus ride, glimpses of a dramatic past—being abandoned by his mother to his grandmother as a young child, living through a toxic relationship with said grandmother, and experiencing a relationship with a young girl that mysteriously goes awry—come to light in dreamlike fluidity, suggesting he’s running away more than seeking out. Upon arrival, he prostitutes himself to little success until meeting a physically disabled slum-dweller named Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who scams him into believing he can hook Joe up with a pimp for work. The two eventually enter a rugged friendship and live together, with Rico as Joe’s manager to yet more small victories. Together, they must survive, whatever that means in the end.

Cowboy delivers a boatload of interpersonal and societal themes related to sexuality, religion, trauma, and surviving by non-traditional means. Voight as Joe provides a charmingly naive lead, stumbling through NYC’s nightlife and slums with a stud’s looks and demeanor but a schoolboy’s brains. His venture into the city is that of a foreigner; he, in his wild Westernized hat and boots, stands out amidst the business attire of New York, with a far more eased mindset than city life’s rapidity necessitates. He has little success because he knows nothing of the city—this is where Ratso comes in. A dirty, crooked man with a polio-induced paralyzed leg, Ratso invites Joe to stay in his condemned apartment building and learn to get by. Together, they explore nightclubs, sex dungeons, secret parties, and women’s only hotels to get Joe that Buck, contrasting each other’s opposing mindsets with equally harmful insecurities. They must learn what they’ve been doing wrong: going it alone.

On his own, Joe experiences continual traumatic repercussions. As the man Ratso scams Joe into believing to be a pimp rips open his toilet door on his knees, pleading, “I’ve prayed on the toilets. It doesn’t matter where you are, so long as you get your prayer!” Joe gets PTSD-like flashbacks to his grandmother and religious imagery; when pushed about not performing for one woman, he gets pressed about being gay. In the same vein of pain, Ratso discusses growing up poor all his life, watching his dad suffer from his job: “My old man spent 14 hours a day down in that subway. He come home at night—2, 3 dollars worth of change stained with shoe polish. Stupid bastard coughed his lungs out from breathing in that wax all day.” Living rough and calling people the homophobic f-slur is all he knows. But together, the two have more security; their friendship grows out of their shared dreams of better living. Even if pressed by prayer or exhausted by long working hours, they each have someone to communicate with.

While the film can feel a bit convoluted, with a few significant subplots never getting straight answers and some incredibly outdated social norms, Midnight Cowboy is a well-designed western-metro hybrid that demonstrates the unspoken, grim slums of NYC (and of most American cities, for that matter). Cowboy is a midnight must, thanks to a sophisticated premise and equally detailed performances.

Screens in 35 mm Saturday, 9/7, 11:59 pm @ Somerville Theatre
Part of the ongoing repertory series: Midnight Specials