There is a moment, early on, when Ben Sanderson decides he is going to drink himself to death and the film simply takes him at his word. No intervention arrives. No friend stages a rescue. Leaving Las Vegas is built on that refusal: it watches a man dismantle himself and a woman love him anyway, and it never once asks either of them to become someone more convenient. Mike Figgis turns what could have been a grim public-service warning into something far stranger and more moving — a love story between two people who agree, in full knowledge, not to save each other.

Nicolas Cage plays Ben, a Hollywood screenwriter who has already lost the job, the marriage and the dignity by the time we meet him; all that is left is the appetite. Cage commits to the role with a physical honesty that still startles — the tremor in the hands, the wet shine of a man permanently three drinks past coherent, the charm that keeps flickering on like a faulty sign. It is a performance with no vanity in it at all, and it won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Three decades on it remains the thing he is measured against.

Elisabeth Shue, as Sera, gives the film its other half and arguably its braver performance. Sera is a Las Vegas sex worker who takes Ben in, and Shue refuses every cliché the part invites — she plays her as watchful, funny, wounded and entirely in command of her own choices. The bond that forms between them is not redemptive and not really about sex; it is a pact of acceptance. He tells her she can never, ever ask him to stop drinking, and she agrees. Shue was nominated for Best Actress, and she matches Cage scene for scene.

Elisabeth Shue as Sera in Leaving Las Vegas — Elisabeth Shue as Sera, the role that earned her an Academy Award nomination.

Figgis, who came out of music and music video, shoots all of this on grainy Super 16, so the neon bleeds and the rooms feel hot and close, lit by table lamps and casino glow. He composed much of the smoky, after-hours jazz score himself, and the film moves to its rhythm rather than to plot beats. Crucially, he declines to judge. There is no moralizing voice, no sociology, no third-act lecture; the camera stays at eye level with two people and lets the tenderness and the horror share the same frame.

That refusal to flinch has a source. The film is adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel by John O’Brien, who took his own life shortly after learning his book would become a movie. Figgis has said the production carried the feeling of working from a kind of suicide note, and that weight is in every frame — this is not a story about addiction observed from a safe distance, but one told from inside it.

What keeps Leaving Las Vegas alive long after the wave of mid-nineties prestige drama receded is exactly its lack of comfort. It does not believe love cures anything; it believes love can be real even when it cannot. The film earned four Oscar nominations — Cage’s win plus nods for Shue, for Figgis’s direction and for his adapted screenplay — but its reputation rests less on the hardware than on how completely it commits to its own bleak, generous premise.

It is, to be clear, a hard watch, and not the film for a fragile night. But it is also one of the most honest romances American cinema produced in its decade, and the finest film about drinking precisely because it is not really about drinking — it is about what people will accept in each other once they have stopped pretending they can be fixed. Essential, with a warning attached.

The facts. Directed and written by Mike Figgis, from the novel by John O’Brien. With Nicolas Cage, Elisabeth Shue, Julian Sands and Valeria Golino. Cinematography by Declan Quinn. 111 minutes. United Artists / MGM, 1995.