Good, Great or Excellent?

Welcome back to the RetrOasis. Today, we are putting a glossy, bruised, and deeply prophetic 1987 drama onto the slab.

I’m talking about Marek Kanievska’s Less Than Zero (1987), loosely based on Bret Easton Ellis’s groundbreaking 1985 debut novel.

I recently pulled this out of a thrift haul, dusted off the plastic, and sat down for a rewatch. I had trouble even writing a standard review for this one because there is just so much to unpack. I saw it nearly 40 years ago when it first hit theaters, but watching it today? Mind-blowing. It doesn’t hit you over the head with cheap moralizing—it just lays out the cold, hollow wreckage of Reagan-era excess.

It was the right movie at the wrong time. A little too soon, perhaps. But decades later, its power performances push this sanitized studio adaptation into a piece of cinema that remains intensely watchable today.

A Softened Masterpiece of Excess

If you are familiar with Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction), you know his world is never a bright, shiny, happy place. His 1985 novel was a famously detached, icy, and episodic look at affluent Los Angeles youth drowning in emotional emptiness.

When 20th Century Fox bought the rights, producers felt the original script draft was too “depressing and degrading” and actively softened the material to make Clay (Andrew McCarthy) a heroic rescuer rather than a passive observer. They turned it into a tragic friendship-and-redemption drama.

Yet, even watered down, the film’s core remains brutal:

• The Downey Ghost: Robert Downey Jr. gives a terrifyingly raw performance as Julian, a charming kid spiraling into a $50,000 crack debt to a cold, predatory dealer named Rip (played with terrifying restraint by James Spader). Downey later admitted that playing Julian became “like the ghost of Christmas future”—a fictional addiction that he tragically came to resemble in the 1990s.

• The Stylized Shell: Cinematographer Edward Lachman shot a neon-drenched, nocturnal Los Angeles that makes the party lifestyle look hypnotic on the surface, while the narrative repeatedly insists that everything beneath it is rotting.

(Side note: Could you imagine if Quentin Tarantino had followed through on the rumors of adapting or remaking this? Watching Tarantino inject his own brand of darkness into Ellis’s semi-autobiographical prose would have been something else entirely.)

The Missing-Streaming Problem: Less Than Zero, Indeed

Here is the real tragedy for a modern audience: if you want to stream this snapshot of 1980s Hollywood darkness tonight, you are completely out of luck.

A quick sweep across major U.S. tracking services like JustWatch reveals zero subscription streaming options and zero digital rental listings.

It’s an incredible paradox. This is a 20th Century Fox title (now sitting in Disney’s massive corporate library) featuring major stars, an R-rated adult profile tailor-made for Hulu, and a legendary, multi-platinum soundtrack produced by Rick Rubin (featuring The Bangles, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Aerosmith, and Slayer).

While the complex, multi-label music clearance rights remain a highly plausible barrier to a new digital rollout, the official corporate record remains silent. Disney/Fox hasn’t offered a public explanation—the film has simply been left to drift into digital oblivion.

The Verdict

Less Than Zero has suffered the strange fate of a cult classic: remembered through Downey’s tragic brilliance, Spader’s ice-cold menace, and The Bangles’ “Hazy Shade of Winter,” while the actual movie is virtually impossible to stream legally.

It is a film about wealth, consumption, and disposability that has itself become disposable in the digital marketplace. Less than zero, indeed.

If you want to watch this dark, electric time capsule, stop renting permission from the cloud. You’ve gotta find the physical plastic.

#lessthanzero #robertdowney #JamesSpader #cult #80s #breteastonellis