Life on the margins has rarely seemed as unromantic as in this harrowingly precise 1971 docudrama, directed by Floyd Mutrux, about heroin addicts in Los Angeles. Some of the performers are actual users, whom he follows on their tawdry rounds of self-inflicted agonies—their scores, fixes, and crimes, as well as their injections, which he presents in unflinching macrophotographic images. One speaker is lucid about an addict’s inability to remain long in working life; another, who has kicked the habit, looks back with wistful pride at the drama of her streetwise survival capers; a third details and then demonstrates his ploy for robbing convenience stores without violence. Mutrux captures with a sharp, furtive eye the crevices of public life that the drug trade fills (particular attention is paid to phone booths), and scenes of Mephistophelian kingpins show that the moral rot of drugs runs through all levels of society. The Top Forty hits that are woven through the film’s soundtrack have a keenly ironic poignancy as dirges for those who had little chance of making it out of the Summer of Love and into the autumn of their years.