This is 3. a “Keanu in the matrix” movie, 2. a Linklater “friends partying and riding around” movie, and 1. a Philip K Dick adaptation:

1. I was 23 when A Scanner Darkly (2006) came out, and remember being disappointed by it, not having any idea what it was supposed to have been about. How could partying with your friends be ugly, unromantic, and desperate? Where do good times ever ride a precarious death-wave of paranoia and addiction? That certainly wasn’t how things were in my dilapidated punk house.

But damn, rewatching this, it felt clear that I didn’t get it because I just hadn’t experienced adult doldrums yet, or seen my reflection in the desperation, powerlessness, and chaos that flow beneath it, or understood the temptation to withdraw from the world into something small, selfish, and strange. This haunted, lonely “my shitty dream is real”-quality is, for me, the main characteristic of Dick’s writing, and Linklater “nails it.”

2. I like Linklater’s “friends partying and riding around” movies – Dazed and Confused (1993), Slacker (1990), Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) – because I too like partying with my friends and riding around. These movies remind me how my friends make me feel more like myself.

A Scanner Darkly is unique in this group because nobody’s having fun and the situation’s bad. Keanu’s depressed; his drug friends are trollish, unpleasant, en route to the bottom. The movie opens with Rory Cochrane (the stoner dude in Dazed & Confused) with hallucinated bugs pouring out of his hair, furiously itching. Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Junior (both annoying “bad boy” actors, both here as annoying wastoids) are in drug-bender dangerous behavior/conspiracy mode, and Keanu’s girlfriend Winona Ryder claims to be too coked-out to bear human contact. Prescient Alex Jones cameo too… woof.

All of Linklater’s buddy movies (including this one) are regional, of a time, and zoomed into a small group of people, and they all do the same trick of flipping that, to be from anywhere, timeless, “archetypical.” Whether anyone “likes” Linklater, I think, has to do mainly with whether his “archetypes” are relevant to their experience, and the extent to which they “agree” with what he ascribes to them. Mostly he does this for sunshine-y stuff, but here’s an absolutely bleak and negative one to think about. What if he’d made more movies in this tonal range?

3. There’s an early scene I found surprisingly moving where Keanu narrates the situation so far. It shows him remembering an earlier point in the house with his wife and daughters, in which he hits his head on a cabinet, and says:

It cuts to the present, cluttered, dingy state of the house, and he continues:

I love the vibration between “I got bored and decided to give up my family, and here’s where it got me” (into a hell zone), and the broader PKD setup, where Keanu is doomed, has no agency, and never sees the full picture anyway. He’s a cop, tasked with surveilling himself and his friends (unbeknownst to them), but his boss is pretending to be his girlfriend (unbeknownst to him), and the entire operation is made to feed his addiction and paranoia intentionally, grooming him for sacrifice to some other purpose entirely beyond his awareness. You don’t get a darker “Keanu in the matrix” movie than that.

Richard Linklater is someone who I’ve grown to admire more and more as a filmmaker as I’ve gotten older.  He has a curious ability to zero in on the mundane spaces where you wouldn’t find the traditional story beats in a movie, expanding them to bring in realities you don’t often see represented in film.  This is especially pronounced today, where it seems like entire film types have been “perfected:” notice the easy-going structural, tonal homogeneity in Marvel films, or any time you’re watching a film that has the same lines from so many other films in the past, like an echo of an echo of a movie.  Linklater’s able to sidestep all of that, opting instead to give attention to and elevate moments that are typically mundane and neglected, though hyper-shared. Playing to this strength, A Scanner Darkly could have been really interesting, but unfortunately Linklater uses it as an excuse to experiment by trying to adopt some of PKD’s strengths instead.  The results lead me to believe, that Linklater is lacking in Fake Fake energy.

It’s been a while since I read A Scanner Darkly but I remember thinking it was good but not one of his best.  But if there’s one area where the book has an advantage it’s that the whole thing wasn’t ding dang rotoscoped. There’s a specific feeling you get from Phillip K Dick’s novels, where you feel like you’re way too deep in whatever plot or system he’s got you trapped in – Linklater might have thought that filtering the whole film would have stuck you in this valley of mysterious structure, with the unusual technology doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  The issue is that for a film to really get into your head, you should never see the hand that’s crafting it, and the rotoscoping is a heavy hand spread across the entire film.

The movie wouldn’t have worked without the rotoscoping either, unfortunately.  Way too much time is spent with Robert Downey Junior and Woody Harrelson’s characters, both of whom seem to sense that this is their opportunity to experiment as well. They’re seemingly locked in a contest to see who can torpedo this film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, each blasting off acting solos completely disconnected from what’s going on.  They also highlight the limitations in the tech by using lots of “big faces” (shades of Tom Goes to the Mayor, where the unreality was used to much better ends). Winona Ryder fares better, but is cursed with an extremely thin character. Keanu Reeves ends up being the most watchable and compelling, his minimalist acting style clashing the least frequently with the animation, occasionally even cutting through the fog and connecting emotionally, but with no one to play off.  I’m a huge booster of Keanu’s work but I’ll readily admit that that’s really not where you want him to be; he excels in creating connections and servicing the story, but isn’t a real “carry the movie” kind of actor. It should be noted that in his band Dogstar, he’s the bassist, which is his pocket in acting as well – creating structure and form, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

For a movie about a nationwide drug crisis that’s slowly killing the US, A Scanner Darkly felt weirdly non-relevant.  The carefree attitude it uses to portray crippling addiction b/w the driving creative force of the film being experimentation (and not addiction) doesn’t really play as well in a time that in some aspects closely reflects the world it depicts.  Nevertheless the movie weirdly comes together in the last ten minutes or so. It begins to quote from the book’s more memorable passages while Reeves’s character’s life falls apart, trained into addiction by one system of control and then sent off to work creating the root of his addiction, in a ruse of being cured. The rotoscoping gets more interesting and ends up creating a somewhat mind-out-of-body experience here, by subtly tweaking the effect we’ve gotten used to, causing deep confusion in the mind’s eye.  The movie ends with the afterword from the book where Dick lists all the names of the people he loved that were addicts coupled with what they lost, both an extremely sad and beautiful moment. Then the screen fades to black, jaunty music plays, and cast and crew are shown in font that wouldn’t look out of place in a show on Nickelodeon.