Knew I might be in for something special when I could vividly imagine the script being written before anyone on screen had even said a word.
Writer 1: Okay, tell you what, the absolute first thing we need to do is establish that this Ron Woodroof is a real tough guy, a real masculine son of a bitch. How do we do that?
Writer 2: How about - get this - he has brooding sex not with one, but with two women, in a stable, right next to a bullriding arena?
[two minutes later]
Writer 1: Alright, next thing is, we gotta show that he's a real nasty homophobe. What do we do?
Writer 2: I got it! The very first line he says is gonna be, "Can you believe Rock Hudson's a cocksucker"? And he and his friends are gonna throw the word "----" around a bunch of times so the viewer really gets how totally homophobic they are.
[two minutes after that]
Writer 1: Well, see here, I think a great idea would be to explicitly foreshadow his eventual death before we actually have to get the plot going.
Writer 2: Yeah! So here's the scene: they're riding in a car and having this small talk, and we have him casually say something like, "Hey, you gotta die somehow".
Me: Fuck, you have got to be kidding me.
At this point I got out a notebook so I could write down stuff like this, which thankfully didn't rear its head every two minutes but there was still quite a bit of it. Overall, it's only interesting as an attempt to update your classic Baity Inspirational Drama, where instead of stuff like sentimental score and cheesy monologuing we get almost no music, unpolished cinematography and a fairly light (but not too light) tone, with the film basically becoming a heist movie for a large stretch of it and presenting Woodroof and Rayon as practically a bickering married couple in most of their scenes.
At the end of the day, it's still completely safe and unchallenging and can't escape its heavy-handed, crowd-pleasing moments - he's one man vs. the system! he forces his homophobic former friend to shake a trans woman's hand! he delivers a righteous "People are dying!" speech! a judge validates him in the end! a bunch of people give him a prolonged applause! hey, that's the name of the movie! they even make bullriding into a last-second metaphor for his fight with death! And, of course, at least one crying scene for everyone. McConaughey does sell everything he needs to sell, but this is a role tailor-made for him; he's far more revelatory and captivating in Killer Joe and True Detective, to name just two recent examples. As for Leto, I never really saw him disappear into the character, both because the script doesn't bother with creating much of a character and because Leto reminded me of himself with almost every gesture and line reading (although his appropriately unsubtle blunt delivery of "God is helping you. I have AIDS" got to me more than I expected). Classic actoring, but hey, it won the guy all those shiny statues.