A Manhattan drug dealer with a wealthy clientele, John LeTour reevaluates both his trade and his life after discovering that his supplier is planning on quitting the business. Meanwhile someone is killing women in apparently drug-related incidents.
With his deliberate speech patterns and haunted, reptilian good looks, Dafoe is an almost nobly sad presence at the center of the film. There's something wonderfully calm about his performance, and it holds Light Sleeper together.
While Dafoe has made a career of looking wasted, and does cynicism better than anyone around, he too is handicapped by his unsympathetic character and Schrader's clumsily unidiomatic script.
It`s a pretty good little movie, not so insignificantly for the performance of Willem Dafoe as the drug delivery man with a desire for a different life.
For all of Schrader's capacity for spectacular self-laceration and spiritual agony, Light Sleeper finds him able for the first time to express a certain peacefulness, and the effect is delicate and discreet.
