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RE-ENTER THE MATRIX: Keanu Reeves gets quizzical.

At least this is the case with Fred (Keanu Reeves), a cop who first appears in Richard Linklater's film of Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel lecturing about the "war on drugs." As members of an anti-drug group called the "True Path" watch his exterior shimmy, Fred begins to wonder why he's talking and what he's saying. His handler speaks quietly into his earpiece, urging him to stick with "the prepared text." Fred tries, mouthing the circular logic that condemns the addict as consumer: "If there were no demand in our society, there would be no market for these leeches to exploit."

But Fred is increasingly fretful. And a cut to inside the suit reveals Bob Arctor ... his other "identity" ... looking squeamish. Bob stumbles over his words, describing his own experience with the latest epidemic drug, the generically named "Substance D." "D," he says, "stands for dumbness and despair and desertion ... D is finally death, slow death."

The simultaneous difference and slide between Fred and Bob is made especially acute ... and mesmerizing ... by rotoscoping, a technique Linklater first explored in Waking Life. The application of shifty animation onto live-action performances makes the very notion of material, lived-in space seem rather quaint. As bodies flutter and warp, their environment appears definitively unstable. And so the paranoia felt by addicts in Scanner makes scary sense.

The handler decides it's time to give Fred a talking to. Back at the office, they sit across from each other in their scramble suits, faces and figures unknowable. For his assignment, Bob is living in a house with a couple of addicts, Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and Luckman (Woody Harrelson). Bob is supposed to uncover some dealing kingpin, who may be himself. To keep his cover, he's been using, and now he's hooked on D.

To the extent that Scanner adopts any conventional shape, it establishes Bob as the most sympathetic, least overtly frantic of the addicts by granting access to his worrying about his status ... as an addict, a narc, a man losing his grip on any number of realities. Examined by a couple of doctors, Bob learns that D is having its inevitable effect, severing the hemispheres in his brain. He can no longer keep track of his multiple lives. He's forgetting where he is and what he's doing. Bob sees a possible future self in yet another addict, the perpetually itchy Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane), who is introduced in mid-frenzy, covered with imaginary bugs and wholly unable to separate what's in his head from what's not. Because the film tends to collapse this distinction as well ... all experiences sharing the same roto-hallucinatory hecticness ... Freck's tumult becomes yours. You can understand his desire to kick but also get the bleak feeling that it's impossible: "Cold turkey doesn't apply to Substance D," declares Barris, "You're either on it or you haven't tried it."

Primary among those who are on it is "Bob's girl," who also happens to be his dealer, Donna (Winona Ryder). Like other women imagined by Philip Dick, Donna is more baffling and remote than dependable, but she also embodies (as much as any rotoscoped character might) a kind of grim knowledge. Another lens through which to view Bob's disintegration, Donna is sometimes sad, other times elusive: She's seen this before, she knows how the system works, she's regretful. For Bob, the fact that she can't bear to be touched ("I do a lot of coke," she says, "Leave my body alone") only makes her seem more special. He begins to hallucinate he's in bed with her instead of the girl he's brought home for the night. Or maybe he's not hallucinating; the machine he's using to read the image doesn't clarify.

Such unhinging is of a piece with the addicts' uncertainty and lack of intimacy, their fear of themselves and their desperation for connection. Watching activities in his house on delayed-tape surveillance cameras in his cop-station cubicle, Bob rewinds and considers his handler's advice that he edit himself out, though not too much, because otherwise, he won't exist, at least in the eyes of those monitoring his actions. Thinking he's a cop, Bob can't tell if that matters.

Bob's junkie story is both banal and bizarre. He's lonely, suspicious, perplexed. He knows he can't find solace in his addiction, and yet he has it and it has him. Simultaneously strange and familiar, not himself, he lives inside an unsolvable world that mirrors our own ongoing fears of surveillance, loss and forgetting.

A Scanner Darkly

Directed by Richard LinklaterA Warner Independent release
Opens Friday at Ritz East