Watched this for the first time. What a long-delayed great surprise!

I remember back about 1995 my girlfriend at the time had rented this and wanted me to come over and watch it with her. I really didn't want to see it, because from the movie poster and the cast and the trailer I watched, it looked like a typical fakey glamorized Hollywood teen picture.

I thought it was probably a 1990s attempt to create a new "Brat Pack", and I was not interested at all. So I said I felt sick and didn't go over to see her that night and missed the movie. When we got together the next day, she was raving about it, but she had already returned it and I still felt skeptical and never bothered to see it for almost 30 years.

I saw a DVD of it for a buck last weekend at a local second-hand shop I visited with my wife (different woman. not old girlfriend) and I bought it and watched it this afternoon. Boy, was I wrong in my assessment of the movie!

"Where the Day Takes You" is an honest, gritty treatment of early 1990s street kids. It's not flashy or contrived at all. It's SO far from the "Brat Pack" flashy junk I expected. I would put this movie on the same shelf as films like "Panic in Needle Park", "Midnight Cowboy", "Taxi Driver", "Foxes", "The Saint of Fort Washington", "Drugstore Cowboy" "Trainspotting" and "Kids". If you like honest looks at the grimy underside of big city life and people who fall through the cracks, this is a must-see.

Besides, where else can you watch Paul Atreides from the '80s "Dune" shooting up Samwise Gamgee from "Lord of the Rings" with smack while a greasy, strung-out Jo from "Facts of Life" looks on in approval?

Hard-hitting, brutally honest and touching, this movie is a lost classic of the urban lowlife tragedy genre. I cannot understand why it is almost forgotten today.