The first time we see Bob Arctor in A Scanner Darkly, he’s wearing what’s known as a scramble suit. Arctor, also known as Officer Fred, is an undercover narcotics agent in a near future California under siege from rampant drug abuse, and he wears the suit to protect his identity. It’s a full-body jumpsuit that projects a constantly shifting jumble of mismatched facial features, hairstyles, and body shapes, turning its wearer into a sort of postmodern holographic Frankenstein. Arctor spend a sizable portion of the film’s running time in the suit, but even as his external features morph and recombine, it’s the dislocation of his internal identity that most enamors the film. The permanent flux of the suit isn’t merely an outward disguise; like everything else in A Scanner Darkly, it’s a state of mind. http://wip.warnerbros.com/

A Scanner Darkly is Richard Linklater’s loopy, ramshackle adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel about cops, drugs, and the security state. Whether in offbeat fare like Waking Life or more mainstream work like School of Rock, Linklater often seems to have a soft spot for aimless slackers. Now, with A Scanner Darkly, another quirky, sympathetic ode to the bloodshot ramblings of lunatic losers, he’s officially crowned himself the stoner philosopher king.

The compulsive, heady pulp of Dick’s stories has proved popular with Hollywood, having spawned such notable adaptations as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report. But while some of the adaptations have resulted in intriguing or entertaining films, none have ever really captured the philosophically dense, paranoid antics that define the Dick aesthetic. There have been movies inspired by Philip K. Dick, but until now, there has never really been a Philip K. Dick movie.

Linklater’s successful transmutation of the source book owes as much to its textual faithfulness as to its novel cinematic approach. Using a technique he pioneered in Waking Life, Linklater first shot the film in live action and then hired a team of animators to draw over each of the filmed frames. Computers were used to speed up the drawing process, but there’s no hint of the clean-and-polished sheen so typical of computer-created imagery. The result is an eerie hybrid of animation and live action; it’s essentially a feature-length graphic novel.

Like Dick’s book, the film unfolds with anarchic fitfulness. Arctor (a vacant, melancholy Keanu Reeves) is narcotics agent who works undercover as a dealer of Substance D, a street drug that has the unfortunate side effect of splitting its user’s hemispheres into separately functioning parts, each unaware of the other’s existence. Problematically, Arctor’s primary target of investigation is himself, meaning that much of the movie consists of watching a scramble-suited Arctor watch surveillance tapes of himself and his tweaked-out druggie pals, Barris and Luckman. Played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Woody Harrelson, Barris and Luckman are druggie’s druggies — twitchy, fried minds that alternate between conspiratorial theorizing and dim-bulb buffoonery. Downey and Harrelson, two well-known real-life heads, give these scenes both a jittery comedic flavor and a buzz of authenticity. Take note: This is your brain on drugs.

Scanner holds up Barris and Luckman as models of substance addicted loserdom, but for the most part, it refrains from fully committing one way or the other on the war against drugs. While the film, in keeping with Dick’s novel, seems suspicious of both the drug-rehabilitation complex and police authority, it is unblinking in its assessment of how drug abuse can decimate the lives of individuals. Illegal drugs, the film suggests, are less a societal problem than a personal one.

No, Linklater’s film is less concerned with engaging in political issues than in grand philosophical questioning. Where the film might have come across as a Minority Report-style deconstruction of the security state, it instead turns its gaze on the appeal of voyeurism. Arctor spends half of his time scheming and dealing with his druggie cohort, then retires to a police-controlled security center to watch himself do it again. After a little while of this, you start to realize that it goes further: We’re watching him watch himself. Subscribing to the skewed, druggie logic of the film’s characters, the natural next step is to wonder, then, who is watching us? Like playwrights Georg Buchner and Samuel Beckett, Scanner doesn’t just portray the fraught and fearful condition of its characters; it recreates that condition for the audience.

Dick’s book honed in on Arctor’s fearful, slowly disintegrating mental state with remarkable precision, and though Linklater doesn’t replicate the book’s fine-grained interiority, he supplants it with the animation’s wobbly, drug-induced haze. By drawing over the photography, Linklater creates a representational barrier between the audience and the subject. What we are seeing is essentially what was filmed, but it’s been reinterpreted by an outside force — sometimes frightfully so. Thus, the film replicates the hallucinogenic fog of drug use by filtering reality through the digital pens of its animators. It’s reality — plus a little bit extra.

– Peter Suderman is assistant editorial director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He maintains a blog on film and culture at www.alarm-alarm.com.