Director Richard Linklater wraps novelist Philip K. Dick's paranoid, prescient nightmare of addiction, anomie, institutional abuse of power, corporate conspiracy, and identity lost down the rabbit hole — or is that a navel? — in the same rotoscoped animation that helped produce the blissed-out groove of his WAKING LIFE (2001). But transforming full, live-action performances into quavering cartoons isn't inherently lyrical, and here it produces the jittery sense of a world dissolving into flat forms and buzzing prattle. It is 2013 and one in five Americans is hooked on a lethally addictive drug, substance D (as in dumbness, despair, desertion or death), on which the government is waging all-out war. Armies of undercover agents/"scanners" infiltrate the lower depths and catalog the 24/7 surveillance footage from cameras planted in the homes of unsuspecting junkies, dealers and (no doubt) upright citizens. Working under constant threat of betrayal, agents wear identity-concealing "scramble suits" — hooded coveralls with an ever-shifting montage of faces and forms rippling across the surface — in the office, and show their true faces only to their lowlife associates. Detox and rehab services are farmed out to the New Path corporation, though persistent whispers hint that New Path also produces substance D. And in a nondescript Anaheim, California, tract house/crash pad, Robert Arctor (Keanu Reeves), roomies Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and friends Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane) — memorably introduced in the grip of a full-blown hallucination involving swarms of alien bugs — and small-time dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) go about their junkie business. Conspiracy-minded opportunist Barris rightly suspects the house is under surveillance, which is where the mind-blowing begins: The police are looking for Donna's biggest client, and the scanner watching the house, Fred, is actually Arctor, who's hooked up with Donna in hopes of unmasking her supplier. But Fred has become a genuine, brain-cell-challenged addict, and when Barris snitches on Arctor, he turns him in to Fred, forcing Arctor into a two-fronted charade he's barely capable of sustaining. Arctor/Fred's descent into personality-crisis hell supplies the nominal plot, but Dick's 1977 novel, which Linklater faithfully reproduces, proceeds from the truth that most of what junkies do is nothing: They drive around aimlessly, talk about deep stuff and forget it a minute later, cop, bicker, pass out, wake up and do it again. Dick's revelation, as painfully pointed as it was three decades ago, isn't that you are who you pretend to be or that the abyss always looks back — it's that opting out of the system just gives the system license to run roughshod over everyone and everything standing in the way of the bottom line. --Maitland McDonagh
