Bob Arctor is enslaved to a drug. Bob, the protagonist played by Keanu Reeves in A Scanner Darkly, the new film by Richard Linklater, spends the film caving to his compulsion for Substance D, a new brand of hallucinogen. Set seven years from now, A Scanner Darkly weaves addiction and apprehension and denial and deceit into an uncomfortable world.Adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, A Scanner Darkly-which was screened Sunday at the Shapiro Theater ahead of its July 7 wide release-is Linklater's second foray with "rotoscoping," an animation technique in which live-action footage is drawn over and animated frame-by-frame.

The technique was pioneered by the early 20th century animator Max Fleischer in his Betty Boop shorts and in 1939, Walt Disney rotoscoped the character of Prince Charming for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

But it was Linklater in 2001 who created the first full-length digitally rotoscoped feature with Waking Life. In its modern approach, rotoscoping involves animators tracing over some of the live acting with digital pens. A program called Rotoshop, created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab veteran Bob Sabiston, fills in the rest.
The technology suits the film. Dick's-and Linklater's-world is fluid. The characters in A Scanner Darkly move as humans but with a slinkiness that requires more than plain flesh. Reeves and his costars-Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder-are easy to recognize, but they are not just actors here. In their animated form they are part of the visual menagerie.
Linklater's opening shot is of a swarm of bugs. Not simple ants or roaches, these bugs are noxious hues of greens and browns that scamper about, eliciting chills and squirms on the screen and in the theater seats. The hive crawls over Freck, a shell of a human consumed by his madness from Substance D. Linklater presents Freck, played with an eerie lurch by Rory Cochrane, with equal doses of pity and disgust.

A Scanner Darkly is a tale of human suffering, and for Bob Arctor most of all, it is a suffering drawn from dueling lives. Bob is also Fred, an undercover cop investigating the distribution of Substance D. Clad in a special suit that presents a different human face twice a second, putting any amazing Technicolor dreamcoats to shame, Fred spies on Bob while Bob sinks into his growing drug-fueled haze.
It is inside these flashing suits the movie is at its best. Reeves is still far from great acting, but submerged from the world, Bob (or Fred) disintegrates in his desolate cave. The suit, serving as both a mask and a vice, represents the horrid dualism of these characters' lives.

Surrounding Bob are Barris, a drug peddler played by Downey, and Donna, another addict and potential lover. Barris is a gunslinger and gangster, a handyman and head case, and powered by Downey, slurs every word and speaks with no declension, all while abusing a meandering savant played by Woody Harrelson.
Ryder is never an unpleasant sight in any role, but rotoscoped, she appears with an otherworldly glow. As Donna, Ryder is at once tense and lissome.
Dick's story is inconveniently choppy for adequate description. Drugs pervade America-the film's nook of Southern California especially-and government eavesdropping is de rigueur (which begs the question of why the opening credits state the film takes place in the future).

What powers A Scanner Darkly is its format. Dick's stories have been adapted before to live action (Blade Runner, Minority Report), but A Scanner Darkly begs for the cool animation. Dick was a master of dystopias, and this one, full of technology and hallucinations is perfect for rotoscoping.

Dick is fortunate, as far as authors whose works are adapted for the screen go. He remarked, shortly before his death in 1982, that Ridley Scott's adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into Blade Runner was "exactly as how [he] imagined it." No stranger to substance abuse, Dick wrote as the postscript to A Scanner Darkly an epitaph to friends he lost to drug addiction, and in Linklater's interpretation, Dick's messages are all there: the tension, the paranoia and, inevitably, the sadness.