‘Light Sleeper’

Writer-director Paul Schrader comes close to transcendence in his 1992 thriller with theological underpinnings, a meditative saga of a drug runner’s inevitable collision with fate. Like almost all of Schrader’s work, it dives into dangerous waters. It has an almost cruelly ambitious subject: the collapse of the 1970s and ‘80s high-style drug culture, as distilled into one man’s pilgrimage. Willem Dafoe stars as a Manhattan cocaine deliveryman and Susan Sarandon plays his sexy drug boss (Showtime Tuesday at 12:35 a.m.).