Excellent performance delivered by McConaughey, and on such a sad part of history. Great movie overall, but it was by no means a benchmark of how things actually went down at the time. AZT was called "poison" in the movie but the reality is that AZT is still a front line defense against HIV/AIDS to this very day, although typically administered with another anti-retroviral alongside.

The initial doses administered in those early clinical trials were absolutely miserable, though. Before human testing had began they only had data in vitro for guessing dosing, and they were going heavy with the dosing in the 80's.