Grade: B

Verdict: A shaggy, often lyrical tour through addiction and into hope.

Details: Starring Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton. Rated R for graphic drug use, strong language, sexuality and some violent images. 1 hour, 50 minutes.

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Review: As the narrator and antihero of "Jesus' Son," Billy Crudup stumbles through a landscape of cheap hotels and desolate roadsides wearing the surprised, slow-blinking expression of somebody who's just coming to - wondering where he is and how he got here and what he lost wherever he was last. Bleary on booze or heroin or a fistful of stolen prescription pills, he's having such a nonstop party that he's missing out on his life.

Like the book of DenisCQ Johnson's vivid short stories that it's based on, the movie mirrors its protagonist's sense of dislocation as it woozily tours a few years in the life of FH. (That's short for the obscene nickname his pals give him, because he manages to screw up in any situation.) The narrative leaps ahead in time, makes digressions and doubles back to complete stories FH forgot to finish. The structure mirrors the book's, and the film uses much of Johnson's grungy-lyrical prose on the soundtrack.

If there's a single thread that draws us along, it's FH's love for a fellow fringe-dweller, Michelle (Samantha Morton). She's the one with the bare midriff and skintight pants, dancing as if there's no one else in the beery living room of an all-day party FH stumbles into. A sense of flaky recognition draws them together. So does sex, and eventually heroin. But they really are in search of love, if they could just figure out what that means. "What if you just pretended you were the one," Michelle tells FH, because going through the motions is better than being alone.

With her waifish looks and radiating sexuality, Morton (an Oscar nominee for last year's "Sweet and Lowdown") offers a blend of breathtaking technique fused to a live-wire spontaneity. Hers is the showier role, but Crudup is the one who has to carry the movie, and he does with a subtlety that's almost self-effacing. The role requires him to hold our sympathy, even when FH is making the latest dumb mistake. He makes you believe that he really can't help himself; he's Peter Pan amped on methamphetamines.

"Jesus' Son" (the title comes from the Lou Reed song "Heroin") is a series of comic riffs, misunderstandings and offhand disasters, including car wrecks, drug overdoses and shootings. Blackly comic, it invites us to hang out with people too wasted to complete a sentence, much less figure out what to do with a corpse in the back seat or a guy with a knife in his eye socket.

The latter shows up in one of the movie's livelier segments. FH is working at a hospital, ostensibly to earn a living for himself and Michelle, but mainly because it gives him easy access to the drug closet. Jack Black, who stole all his scenes in "High Fidelity," is just as good here as the whacked-out orderly who joins FH for a memorable nighttime encounter with a handful of premature baby rabbits.

There's also a strong, small performance by Denis Leary as a beaten-down bar buddy, reduced to vandalizing his own home to pay for that night's fix.

Set in the 1970s, "Jesus' Son" benefits from the era's textures, the grubby knit caps and plaid shirts that seem to soak up the chilly, damp environment. The film is like "Trainspotting" or "Drugstore Cowboy" played out on the suicidally prosaic Midwestern plains. New Zealand director Alison Maclean ("Crush") leavens the bleakness with grainy poetry, like the image of a spectral, deserted drive-in theater on a snowy night, the sight of a phantom reflection in a subway window or FH's hallucination of bandages and cotton balls coming to life in the hospital.

Once it leaves the damp behind and hits sunny, dry Phoenix (and rehab for FH), "Jesus' Son," like its source book, loses some steam. Recovery just isn't as dramatically interesting as the craziness that comes before. Cameos by Dennis Hopper and Holly Hunter are also a little distracting here, since the movie has mainly been cast with faces less recognizable. But for the most part, it's a funky fever dream, a mosaic of chaos, beautifully pieced together.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service