Midnight Cowboy is a gritty 1969 drama about a naive Texas man who goes to New York City to become a hustler and instead finds a painful, tender friendship on the margins of society.

Quick Scoop: What is Midnight Cowboy About?

At its core, the film follows Joe Buck, a young Texan dishwasher who quits his job, dresses up as a flashy “cowboy,” and heads to New York City convinced he can make easy money as a male prostitute for wealthy women. Instead, he’s quickly exploited, runs out of money, and ends up nearly homeless in a harsh, indifferent city.

There he meets Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, a sickly, limping small-time con man living in a crumbling building who first cheats Joe, then reluctantly becomes his only real friend. The movie tracks their uneasy partnership—trying to hustle, steal, and survive—while Ratso dreams of escaping to sunny Florida and Joe is forced to confront his own traumatic past and illusions about masculinity and success.

The story slowly shifts from Joe’s fantasy of being a cool, desired cowboy to something more intimate: two desperate outsiders forming a fragile bond in a city that has no place for them. By the end, as Joe tries to take Ratso to Florida for a better life, the film becomes a bleak but deeply human portrait of friendship, loneliness, and the cost of chasing the wrong dreams.

Themes and Tone

  • Urban isolation and disillusionment: New York is shown as cold, exploitative, and alienating, shattering Joe’s dream of easy sex and money.
  • Masculinity and sexuality: The movie explores blurred sexual boundaries, male vulnerability, and the gap between Joe’s macho image and his inner fragility.
  • Poverty and survival: Joe and Ratso live in severe poverty, scamming, selling blood, and stealing just to stay alive.
  • Unlikely friendship: Despite using each other at first, their relationship becomes the only real emotional anchor either man has.

The tone is rough, adult, and often bleak, but there’s an undercurrent of tenderness in how it depicts two broken people trying to look out for one another.

Why People Still Talk About It

  • It’s widely considered a landmark of late‑1960s American cinema, known for its gritty realism and taboo-breaking subject matter.
  • It was originally rated X in the U.S. and is famously the only X‑rated film to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
  • Performances by Jon Voight (Joe) and Dustin Hoffman (Ratso) are often cited as some of their best, especially Hoffman’s portrayal of a frail, proud hustler clinging to a fantasy of Florida sunshine.

In current forum and review discussions, people tend to focus on how modern and emotionally raw the friendship still feels, even though it’s a film from 1969, and how its depiction of queerness, trauma, and poverty plays very differently to today’s audiences than it did on release.

TL;DR: Midnight Cowboy is about a naive Texan who goes to New York to sell sex, fails, and ends up forming a deeply moving, tragic friendship with a dying con man while both struggle to survive at the bottom of the city.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.