This is your brain. This is your brain watching A Scanner Darkly (supply your own scary illustrations). Utilising the same phantasmagoric computer-rotoscoped animation he once employed for Waking Life, Richard Linklater has achieved something any sane, rational person would have thought impossible – he’s made a coherent film from Philip K. Dick’s labyrinthine A Scanner Darkly. Of course, the Austin-based auteur has form in this regard. Since his earliest work on Slacker and Dazed And Confused, Mr. Linklater has displayed an extraordinary ear for the rhythms of drug-addled witterings. But by Waking Life and Before Sunset, one could sense a maturing jadedness with life in the garret. A Scanner Darkly, like the source novel, follows this trajectory into bitter disillusionment, ending as Dick’s text did, with a roll call of corpses found by the roadside less travelled.
This semi-autobiographical sci-fi classic, written in 1977 and set in 1994, charts the rapidly dissolving reality around a group of South Californian dope-fiends addicted to the neuro-chemically altering Substance D. The narc on the case is Agent Fred (Keanu Reeves) who lives among the ne’er-do-wells as Bob Arctor. Unable to reveal his identity to the users or the police, his descent into addiction leaves him investigating himself.
His disintegration is aided and abetted by his equally damaged housemates, including paranoid Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), goofy Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and their frigid dealer Donna (Winona Ryder). A jittery overture depicting fellow user Rory Cochrane swiping at imaginary creepy-crawlies sets the tone before Linklater takes a complete scythe-swipe at the ‘blue flower of romanticism’.
But this is no public service announcement. As the paranoid conspiracy plays out, the director still has fun with the milieu. Mr. Downey Jr – quel surprise – provides an endlessly entertaining delusional rant – a comical, wholly unreliable Greek chorus that should prove a hit with like-minded individuals everywhere. Mr. Reeves, often represented as a spectacularly rendered scramble-suit, yet again proves his inestimable worth as a tabula rasa.
That visual trick, like the entire darn enterprise, is remarkably, eerily beautiful, as the thick graphic novel lines make the trippy tangible and the tangible trippy. Trust no one, kids. Except for Richard Linklater.