Ironically enough, Ron Woodroof is a bit like a more inspirational version of Walter White from Breaking Bad. See if this sounds familiar, but a bit wilder in some ways and slightly more compassionate in others. Woodroof, circa 1985, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, and has raw one-nighters (or a quickie right in one of the pens during one of his bull riding gigs at the rodeo).

He doesn’t have anyone solid in his life—his parents get mentioned at one point but that’s it—and he becomes sick. He coughs up all over the place, gets woozy, and passes out in his home. After getting knocked out at work, he winds up at the hospital, and is told by the good doctors (Denis O’Hare and Jennifer Garner) that he is HIV positive.

He doesn’t take it well—the F-word gets dropped left and right, usually by Ron—and goes on a booze bender, denying that he has, according to his doctors, 30 darn days left. There’s a new drug, AZT, but he can’t get it—except down in Mexico. But there he’s told by another doctor (Griffin Dunne), that AZT is actually not very good, despite the reports from the friggin’ Food and Drug Administration.

So, what to do about his condition? Or that of another patient, transvestite Rayon (Jared Leto), who’s in the clinical trials and not getting any better? How about off-the-market supplements? But more than that, how about making some money off it in Dallas and the surrounding area? Ron picks up a lesson from the Buyer’s Clubs in New York City—where members pay monthly dues and get all the necessary help.

The writers researched how the club worked, and had more 25 hours of recorded interviews with the real Woodroof in 1992, just before he passed away, a full seven years after he was told he wouldn’t make it past a month. The film has an authenticity to it, to the language, mannerisms, and the period mood of a frightened public on one side without proper information (the ex-Redneck buddies of Ron’s freak out a little when he spits on them in disgust) and those who were trying to stay alive, even if it was with non-FDA tested drugs, as documented in last year’s kinda companion piece, How to Survive a Plague.

The movie is tough, for not giving an inch in making Ron an easy person to like. Like another great protagonist role in this fall season, Solomon Northrup in 12 Years a Slave, it all comes down to this: does one just survive, or can one live? Suffice to say, both actors in these films really bring their all to their roles.

I’ll just be boring and say this is Matthew McConaughey’s best performance… this year. Following a towering turn in Killer Joe and in the gems Bernie, Magic Mike, and Mud, McConaughey is like an actor reborn or risen from the ashes of Hollywood romcom slop to become a consistently compelling presence and even a force who brings his characters to full life. (The trailers for The Wolf of Wall Street hold the same promise)

And as Ron, McConaughey lost 50 pounds (though oddly enough, the shock of seeing him so thin wore off—not so much for Leto, especially under all his make-up). Ron can be piercingly, outrageously funny, offensive, dark, a practical-minded businessman, and a born con man. When he is caught by customs agents, which happens a few times, he is completely believable and never breaks a sweat, even when, say, acting as a “doctor” with a list of patients’ names that are players on the Dallas Cowboys.

It’s an actor’s movie through and through, with solid supporting turns from Denis O’Hare as the no-AZT-is-good-keep-it-going doctor and Garner as the more ambivalent, kindhearted doc that Ron befriends, and maybe falls in love with (perhaps, the only time he has a connection with a woman that doesn’t involve any sex). If there’s anything not quite excellent about the film is that Garner, though good, just isn’t up to the level of work of her co-stars. Also, some of the melodrama—not all of it, but some—midway through with Rayon and his drug use drama smacks a bit of the same tension between Sean Penn and Diego Luna in Milk. It drags the film when the real meat is with Ron’s drug business and his battles with the FDA and IRS.

Ron, like Walter White, ends up doing some legally questionable things for his family. Unlike Breaking Bad’s good ol’ Heisenberg drug lord, Ron’s makeshift family is sincerely grateful for his bucking the system and giving them some relief, if not a cure, for their ailments. After something goes wrong for Ron late in the film, he returns to the club, and members greet him with applause, stunning him. He did it for the money and his health, and now, suddenly, there’s all this attention to the cause—there’s more meaning to life than the rodeo.