rug addiction hampers a detective's thinking process in “A Scanner Darkly,” a cryptic adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 30-year-old work of science fiction, set seven years in the future. Directed by Richard Linklater, the Austin-based individualist who gave us Before Sunrise and School of Rock, this personal work studies the ravages of drug abuse and the casualties suffered when the government tries to control it.

As he did with Waking Life, Linklater overlayed his actors in the film with animation. This film involved an intense animation process that required many weeks to create one minute of screen time, thusly creating animation that has an expressive quality that many of the actors failed to show. Wired magazine once suggested that the animation process was so intense that movie might never get completed.

The time elements of the story have shifted (the book was written in ‘77), but the plot remains the same. In the near future (seven years from now), when government spying has taken the next step into thought surveillance, America is still losing the war on drugs, with 20 percent of the population addicted to Substance D, a lethally addictive drug about which it’s said, “You’re either on it or haven’t tried it.” Still, the Substance D epidemic has been a bonus to the New Path Company, which is profiting from the drug's production as the firm has the monopoly on rehab facilities.

Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor, an undercover cop who develops a split personality after taking Substance D (so named for causing "dumbness, despair, desertion and death"). He lives in a flop house in the Orange County suburbs with a group of D-using roommates that include Jim Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), the eternally bug-haunted Charles Freck (Cochrane) and Bob’s girlfriend Donna Hawthorne (Ryder), who is suspected of dealing.