New Restoration

“Among the most dangerous, fearless Canadian films that I’ve seen.”

Nick Pinkerton, Artforum

“Huck Finn on coke,” per the director’s own description, Allan Moyle’s quasi-autobiographical debut feature is a loose, largely improvised vérité portrait of a makeshift family of peddlers and addicts in the atrophying counterculture of ​’70s Montreal. Scanners​’s Stephen Lack plays the charismatic ringleader Steve, on whom the commune depends for narcotics to sell and snort—though harder-drug heroin has become the newest fix among some. When Steve flirtatiously befriends a McGill sociology student (Moyle) intrigued by the ​“upside” of habitual drug use, the outsider enters the fold just as fissures begin to form. Meanwhile, the group’s biggest score sits in a locker in Windsor Station surveilled by cops ready to pounce. Selected for both Locarno and NYC’s New Director/​New Films, The Rubber Gun became a minor hit at home, earning Genie nominations for Actor and Screenplay. Moyle would later helm the soundtrack-immortalized ​’90s teen movies Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records.

“One of the best films of the 1970s.”

TIFF Canadian Film Encyclopedia

“An inventive drug drama that set the stage for Drugstore Cowboy, Trainspotting, and a number of other unflinching films that made waves in subsequent decades.”

Canadian Independent Pictures
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