They cheated us out of a proper film score!
If you go out and spend 99 cents on the Madonna 45 of Live To Tell, then you've got the soundtrack of At Close Range, more or less.
The score is eerily fitting in most parts of this, and is especially effective in the great opening scene, but union laws should have blocked this kind of copout on hiring a real film composer to do the score for a film.
The song Live To Tell was written for another artist and another film, rejected, recycled for use by Madonna in At Close Range, then recycled and stretched out into an entire hour of music for this film.
From before the opening frame of this film, a stretched out variant of Live To Tell is already being played. They play the synthesizer chords of the song much more slowly, milking it for all it's worth, again and again and again and over again, then after the synthesizer started smoking due to overuse, they started playing the same god damned thing on a guitar, then they played the whole pop song version as well.
This movie both begins and ends on this one song, and at least 90% of the score in between is variants of the same song, just jamming on the theme of the song, they play the chords that go along with "...I know where beauty lives..." again and again and again.
I liked this song a lot in 1986, but it hasn't held up over time, and severely dates a film that would have been timeless otherwise. The drum machine and DX7 (an overused Yamaha synthesizer that was used more than all other synthesizers combined between 1983 and 1987) made the song almost unplayable after the 80s were over. It just wears the viewer down with 80s-ness and makes the film sound dated. Coming from me, this is really saying something, as I am in the synthesizer business (and the DX7 was my main synth in the 80s!).
The credits for this film are screwy. It doesn't credit someone as the composer consistently and in the normal way:
Here on IMDB, it doesn't credit anyone as the film composer! The Patrick Leonard page just says "At Close Range (1986) (writer: "LIVE TO TELL")"., but the full cast and crew page for At Close Range doesn't list a composer, and doesn't even mention Patrick Leonard!
On the Wiki page, it just says "Music by Patrick Leonard (and) Madonna".
In the onscreen credits of the movie itself, it just says "Music by Patrick Leonard".
Anyway, it is a copout and the viewers got cheated out of a real film score for this fine film.
The end of the movie is really crap, stopping on a freeze frame and starting up the drum machine with this pop song that you'd already been hearing for the last two hours, making the end shot like CHiPs or any 80s TV movie.