A Scanner Darkly (15)

More than two decades have passed since the death of Philip K Dick, and in that time his work has lent itself to a number of film adaptations - the good (Blade Runner), the bad (Paycheck, Impostor), the mega-budget guilty pleasure (Total Recall) and the dreamy, dingy, arty blockbuster (Minority Report).

This adaptation of his 1977 novel, A Scanner Darkly, scripted and directed by Richard Linklater, emphasises the introspective, personal side of Dick's fiction over the sci-fi pyrotechnics. Like Linklater's other work - Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset - A Scanner Darkly is concerned with relationships, with identity, with characters trying to find their place in a befuddling world. And the questions that it asks are far from fantastical. What if a government that claimed to be combatting the scourge of drug abuse was, in fact, covertly facilitating it, in the interests of maintaining existing social hierarchies and subduing potentially radical factions? And what if its supposed war on drugs was a fiction, in place to justify the systematic erosion of citizens' personal freedoms?

This is a drug movie that looks beyond the customary cycle (happy addiction - miserable addiction - rehabilitation/death) to the power structures that enable and feed dependency. The look of the film, meanwhile - live action digitally painted to resemble animation, via a painstaking process called interpolated rotoscoping - highlights the sense of everyday reality once-removed.

Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor, who used to be a regular semi-detached office drone and married dad, but now passes his time amid druggy dropouts. Like 20% of the population, Arctor and his friends are habitual users of a drug called Substance D, or Death. But Arctor has another life, too, participating in the government's supposed struggle against the epidemic of addiction; his identity disguised by a "scramble suit" that masks him behind a shifting spectrum of different human faces and bodies, he reports to his superiors on the Substance D supply network. That means monitoring his own nearest and dearest, including his roommates Barris (Robert Downey Jr) and Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and his unrequited love and direct Substance D source, Donna (Winona Ryder).

Reeves's best performances utilise his oddly blank, innocent aspect; here, as in The Matrix, he's an everyman with a hint of the reluctantly messianic. Yet his work as Arctor also channels an iconic role from earlier in his career: that of the idiot-savant skatepunk philosopher Ted in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Mournful and serious as much of its subject matter is, A Scanner Darkly is first and foremost an extremely funny film, which captures with mischievous insight the gallows humour and strange obsessions of hedonistic cliques. Much of the film is given over to free-wheeling, frenetically hilarious exchanges between Downey and Harrelson (both of whom, like Ryder, have their own high-profile histories of substance-misuse to call upon).

Among Barris's many rapid-fire attacks on Luckman's character is the observation: "You seem to be progressing through life like a cat without whiskers, perpetually trapped behind the refrigerator." Some might find Linklater's film similarly aimless. Having initially built towards a wild-eyed but broadly conventional conspiracy thriller, it takes a leap into the inexplicable about two-thirds of the way through; the wacky comedy falls away, along with any hope of establishing a solid truth, and Arctor's fuzzy sense of reality sets the tone. In this inconclusiveness, as in its wayward humour and its boldly experimental visual style, A Scanner Darkly is potentially alienating - but so is any brave, honest, questioning work of art.

When I was young science fiction offered a pleasant view of our future conjuring up worlds of jet packs, food pills, and wristwatch radios. Then I read Philip K Dick.

The future according to Dick is not a happy place. It's a dark, authoritarian future where our lives are no longer our own and faceless fascist governments have taken over.

This has provided fertile movie material with films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report based on Dick's work and - to a lesser extent - films such as The Matrix have been directly inspired by it.

None of them captures the sheer hopelessness of Dick's vision more than A Scanner Darkly.

Set in the near future when society is in the grip of a hugely addictive drug called Substance D, Keanu Reeves plays a cop sent deep undercover to try to crack a drugs ring in Orange County.

His public identity is a man called Bob Arctor, his private identity is Agent Fred - a man whose true self is never revealed because of the chameleon-like "scramble suit" he wears on duty.

Bob has been undercover for a long time. He's also been taking Substance D to maintain his cover. Now it's starting to have an effect. He's not sure where Bob starts and Agent Fred starts.

And where does his wife and kids fit into all of this?

A lot has been made of the look of A Scanner Darkly. Director Richard Linklater shot the movie with real actors and then used a process called rotoscoping to turn it into a sort of animation.

The result is a little disquieting at first as you try to spot the cartoon versions of Robert Downey Jnr and Woody Harrelson.

In fact, it turns out to be a brilliant narrative device because very soon you almost forget about the image and concentrate on the dialogue.

It's like listening to a radio play with accompanying images and allows Linklater, who also wrote the film, to pack his script with some very interesting ideas about identity and responsibility, knowing that the audience has a chance of taking it all in.

There's a lot of fun to be had in Downey and Harrelson and their permanent stoner routine, but A Scanner Darkly is also a provocative and disturbing drama which rewards the effort it requires.