MIDNIGHT COWBOY

Young Texan Joe Buck quits his dishwashing job, and heads by bus to New York City in cowboy attire to become a male prostitute. Initially unsuccessful, he finally beds a middle-aged woman, Cass, in her Park Avenue apartment. She is insulted when he requests payment, and Joe ultimately gives money to her.

Joe meets Rico "Ratso" Rizzo, an indigent con man with a limp who takes $20 for introducing him to a pimp. After discovering that the alleged pimp is actually an unhinged religious fanatic, Joe flees and unsuccessfully searches for Rico. Joe spends his days wandering the city, listening to his Zenith portable radio and sitting in his hotel room. When his money runs out, management locks Joe out and impounds his belongings.

In an attempt to make money, Joe receives oral sex from a meek young man in a movie theater, but the man cannot pay. Joe threatens him, but releases him unharmed. The next day, Joe spots Rico at a diner, and angrily confronts him. Rico manages to calm Joe, and invites him to share his squalid, condemned apartment squat. Joe reluctantly accepts, and the two begin a "business relationship" as hustlers. Rico asks Joe to call him "Rico" instead of "Ratso", but Joe does not oblige. They struggle with severe poverty, stealing food and failing to get work for Joe. Joe pawns his radio and sells his blood, while Rico's persistent cough worsens during a winter without heat in the freezing apartment.

In intermittent flashbacks, Joe's grandmother raises him after his mother abandons him. He has a tragic relationship with Annie, his first girlfriend and sexual partner, disclosed through hazy flashbacks in which they are attacked and raped by a cowboy gang. Annie shows signs of mental trauma and is taken into an ambulance.

Rico tells Joe his father was an illiterate Italian immigrant shoeshiner whose job yielded a bad back and lung damage from inhaling shoe polish. Rico learned shoeshining from his father, but considers it degrading and generally refuses to do it. When he breaks into a stand and shines Joe's cowboy boots to attract clients, two police officers arrive and sit with their dirty boots next to Joe's. Rico dreams of escaping to Miami, shown in fantasies in which he and Joe frolic on a beach and are pampered at a resort, including a boy polishing Rico's boots.

Gretel, a Warhol-like filmmaker and an extrovert female artist approach Joe in a diner, taking his photograph and inviting him to a psychedelic party. Joe and Rico attend, but Rico's poor health and hygiene attract unwanted attention. After mistaking a joint for a cigarette and receiving uppers, Joe hallucinates. He leaves with Shirley, a socialite who pays him $20 for spending the night, but Joe cannot perform sexually. They play Scribbage, and the resulting wordplay leads Shirley to suggest that Joe may be gay; suddenly, he is able to perform. The next morning, she sets up her female friend as Joe's client, and at last his career appears to be progressing.

When Joe returns to the apartment, Rico is severely feverish. He refuses medical help, and begs Joe to put him on a bus to Florida. Desperate for cash, Joe picks up an effeminate middle-aged man in an arcade. The two return to the man's hotel room, where Joe demands money. However, when the man refuses to give him more than $10, Joe brutally beats, robs, and apparently smothers him. Joe buys two bus tickets to Florida with the stolen cash. Rico again tells Joe that he wants to be called "Rico", not "Ratso", and Joe finally begins to oblige. During the bus trip, Rico's health worsens, and he suffers from urinary incontinence.

Joe buys new clothing for Rico and himself at a rest stop, discarding his cowboy outfit and boots. Back on the bus, Joe muses that there must be an easier way to make money than hustling, and tells Rico that he will get a regular job in Miami. When he does not respond, Joe realizes that Rico has died. Joe alerts the bus driver, who asks Joe to close Rico's eyelids, saying that they will soon be in Miami. With tears in his eyes, Joe sits with his arm around his dead friend as the bus continues past rows of Floridian palm trees.

Joe and Ratso's partnership culminates in a desperate journey to Miami as Ratso's health deteriorates, with Joe forced to confront the realities of their friendship and survival.

The ending underscores the fragility of dreams and the cost of connection in an indifferent world. Joe's transformation from naive dreamer to hardened survivor is both a personal reckoning and a commentary on broken American promises, while his bond with Ratso remains the film’s emotional center—tender, tragic, and deeply human.