Linklater's 'A Scanner Darkly' shines

What sounds like paranoia today may well be tomorrow's accepted fact.

Richard Linklater has suggested as much in the past, listening closely to supposed kooks from "Slacker" and beyond. But in "A Scanner Darkly," he goes further, giving his full attention and sympathy to Philip K. Dick, the visionary author who never met a reality he felt he could trust.

Warner Independent Pictures 'A Scanner Darkly' 4 out of 5 stars The verdict: Adeptly brings classic sci-fi novel to the screen. Director: Richard Linklater Starring: Keanu Reeves, Mitch Baker, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson Run time: 100 minutes Release date: July 7, 2006 Rating: R for drug and sexual content, language and a brief violent image. See showtimes Meet the director Richard Linklater may be the best European director ever born in Texas. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'A Scanner Darkly'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

"Scanner" was published in 1977. Reality might not have caught up to it entirely just yet, but see if this sounds familiar: The nation is fighting a war on drugs that gets more hopeless with each passing year. In fact, it almost seems that in some shady way the workings of our society actually require a large chunk of the populace to be addicted to something. Oh — and the government is spending a whole lot of time spying on its citizens. This is Linklater's first science-fiction film, if you're wondering.

Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a narcotics agent who, after years undercover, has come not only to identify with those he's investigating, but to be hooked on the same stuff they use: Substance D, colloquially known as Death. The drug has an ugly side effect: It is messing with Arctor's brain, dissociating his law-enforcing persona with the one he uses among the addicts. To make matters worse, secrecy concerns require him to wear a "scramble suit" when visiting headquarters — the high-tech camouflage protects his identity, but it also keeps colleagues from providing any kind of personal assistance. Keeping the rabble in line is a lonely, dangerous job.

"Scanner" is animated in the fashion of Linklater's "Waking Life," which seems to make some people think it's a hard sell for the adult audience. But this comics-influenced style is the ideal vehicle for a story where every bit of human interaction is colored either by mind-altering drugs or by the persona-stretching demands of Arctor's double life.

(The filmmakers probably sold financiers on the animation technique by saying it was necessary to bring the "scramble suit" to life. In truth, fans of the novel might find the suit's visualization the least satisfying aspect of the film — it's an idea that works better in the mind's eye — nevertheless, animation was the right way to depict this tweaked version of our world.)

Linklater and company, unsurprisingly, are sure-footed in getting this pessimistic vision onto the big screen. Where other filmmakers have combed through Dick's fiction to find the most easily exploited elements, Linklater clings to the story's essence, from the novel's very first sentence (a skin-crawling account of drug-induced hallucination) onward. The book's sad but nonjudgmental attitude toward addiction dominates, with all drugs seen in the same light — as problems people bring upon themselves, whose cost is high enough that no burden of guilt need be added to it.

And yet, "Scanner" is a very funny movie. An outsider might wonder if Reeves' co-stars — Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. — were chosen because their extracurricular activities brand them "problem" actors. Certainly, they bring a tension to the screen that serves the story; Downey, in particular, mines his anti-establishment itchiness for comic value. But if there's an ensemble camaraderie in tabloid notoriety, "Scanner" doesn't exploit it. Instead, these actors bring warmth to the misfit characters Dick based on his own friends — casualties in a drug war they didn't start, "people who were punished entirely too much for what they did."